Road rage | Politics of renaming a street in Bengal

A blue and white metal pole, about 2.5 metres tall, with a freshly painted green coloured signboard stands at the edge of the street leading eastward from Park Circus 7 Point Crossing in Kolkata. Not more than a dozen houses stand on the left side of the street. On the right side is the Park Circus Maidan, which was the epicentre of the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act, protests a few years ago.

A lush growth of the green grass now covers the protest site while the hurriedly erected signboard reads ‘Gopal Mukherjee Road’, in Bengali and English. Before June 20, this road was called Suhrawardy Avenue. However, within six weeks of coming to power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in West Bengal named it after Gopal Mukherjee, who ran a goat meat shop in north Kolkata and is considered to have “saved Hindus during the Great Calcutta Killings in 1946”.