Mamata storms police station: Who won?

GN Bureau | November 8, 2011



What comes first: party one represents or the office one holds? For West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, the choice was obvious when she stormed a police station in Kolkata late on Monday night in an unprecedented intervention to ensure release of two of her party members arrested for rioting, arson and ransacking the police station about an hour earlier. 

The police action came after her party members leading a mob of 300 clashed with policemen, who had asked them not to burst high-decibel crackers late in the evening outside a cancer institute and a children’s hospital in south Kolkata.

Banerjee might have won the day for her party members with her imprudent action, but didn’t the CM’s office lose big time to realpolitik?    

 

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