ON January 27, the residents of Agartala witnessed the senseless, inhuman barbarities inflicted by police and paramilitary forces on the 10,323 retrenched teachers squatting in front of the City Centre in Melarmath. Police started indiscriminate lathi-charge on the teachers, both men and women, at pre-dawn hours as they were sleeping at their protest site in bone-chilling cold. The police demolished their temporary structure for their night-stay, took away their three donation boxes with approximately Rs 2.5 lakh, food and even warm clothes and vanity bags of women.