Kolkata: The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) has alleged that police in Bengal had kept an activist of Student Federation of India (SFI) chained to a hospital bed for several hours on Tuesday night.
Santosh Sahani, 21, a student of Surya Sen College who lives in Siliguri’s Bagrakote, was arrested along with around 50 Left activists on April 10. He was produced in court the next day, where he fell ill and was taken to the Siliguri District Hospital. He was sent to prison from the hospital after two days, but was moved to the North Bengal Medical College hospital in Siliguri on Monday.
CPI-M allege that he had been treated like cattle. According to CPi-M leader Asok Bhattacharya, who visited Sahani on Tuesday morning, the youth had spent over six hours of the previous night handcuffed to a bed, initially while lying on the floor and, subsequently, on the bed. Sahani had allegedly asked to go to the toilet for hours, but had been ignored. “The Siliguri Police used handcuffs on the student’s left leg to chain him to the hospital bed on grounds that it could not depute policemen to keep a watch on him. This is inhuman and such atrocities against Left activist are deliberately done by the police to ensure they get mentally unstable. Such crudeness was not seen even during Naxal movement,” said Bhattacharyya.
A senior police official of Siliguri Special Jail told local news channels that Santosh was confined to the bed in the male general ward and cuffs were put on his left leg as there was no guard to watch over him.
“The person is an undertrial, not a convict. How can he be chained like this? It is inhuman and violation of basic human rights. Such surveillance has been done away with long before, but our policing seems to be medieval even now,” said rights activist Sujato Bhadra.
Recently, the death of SFI leader Sudipto Gupta in police custody had created a furore in the state. His comrades allege that he was brutally beaten by the police and was then thrown out of the bus, but police and Trinamool Congress (TMC) leaders maintain that he died of an accident, when his head hit a lamppost.
“There is a strategic movement by the police in consultation with the ruling party to defuse the student movement in the state, so that no future leaders can come up. It is being orchestrated in a manner so that activist like Santosh leave the party and seeing his plight others join him to weaken the Left movement in the state,” said CPI-M leader, Gautam Deb.
