Kalyan Banerjee, a Lok Sabha MP and a Mamata Banerjee loyalist, got emotional on Monday as he offered prayers to Goddess Durga inside a Durga Puja pandal in West Bengal.
Sitting beside an impressive Goddess Durga idol, Banerjee, overwhelmed, chanted a Sanskrit shloka in respect of the deity and cried.
“Give me wisdom, give me strength, give me knowledge, give me devotion, Ma,” he said on camera.
There is a failure on the part of the Kolkata Commissioner of Police, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, and the station officer. What was the police doing? “The pandal was inaugurated by the Chief Minister, along with police officers. Why did they not notice that insufficient arrangements were made? There was insufficient police presence… It was a total failure on the part of the state administration,” he added. He blamed the chief minister for the accident. The Kolkata Police have arrested seven people, including puja organisers, in connection with the stampede. These include members of the organising committee — Chorebagan Sarbojanin Durgotsab committee general secretary Raj Kumar Sewda and vice-president Santanu Dubey — besides Biplab Mukherjee, who built the bamboo structure; Koushik Saha and Pintu Dey, who were responsible for crowd control; and Suman Chakraborty and Rajesh Pal, who were in charge of private security.
“You see, I have already said that there is total mismanagement. How did they permit that?” he said. He said that the pandal’s entry and exit gates were located in narrow alleys.
