A FESTIVAL belongs fundamentally to the working masses who build it, animate it, and sustain its collective social life. In Bengal, the autumn festival has historically represented a broad, democratic commons—a popular cultural space where neighbourhood solidarity, working-class labour, and progressive intellectual inquiry have consistently pushed back against feudal patronage and bureaucratic control. This Sharadotsav (the traditional and cultural name for Durga Puja), however, the people of Bengal witnessed a grotesque juxtaposition that exposes the priorities of the ruling dispensation. On one hand, the state deployed municipal bulldozers, police detachments and reactionary mobs to dismantle Left bookstalls and dictate cultural vocabulary. On the other, criminal administrative neglect turned Bengal’s largest mass gathering into a scene of carnage, leaving nineteen people dead in a preventable stampede at Chorbagan in North Kolkata.

THE HEGEMONIC OFFENSIVE

The ideological offensive was set in motion from the highest political echelon when Chief Minister Shubhendu Adhikari issued a direct call right in the state Assembly to exclude the Left from public life. Directing neighbourhood Puja committees to shut down stalls that described the festival as Sharadotsav rather than Durga Puja, and vilifying communists with dehumanising epithets, BJP attempted to enforce strict majoritarian conformity over a shared cultural event. This dispute was never about the lettering on a banner; it was an attempt to make the right to occupy public space conditional on ideological submission.

As CPI(M) State Secretary Mohammad Salim underscored, the attack deliberately conflated the upolokkho (the occasion) with the lakshya (the objective). The festive gathering provides the occasion, but the objective of a Marxbadi Pustak Bikray Kendra (Marxist Book Sales Centre) is to popularise critical reading, challenge obscurantism, and circulate progressive ideas. Invoking Rabindranath Tagore’s celebrated drama Sharadotsav, Salim reminded the public that the phrase is an integral part of Bengal's secular literary heritage, not a partisan provocation. Sujan Chakraborty, member of the CPI(M) Central Committee, pointed out that the stalls are fundamentally book sales centres, rendering the administration's linguistic diktats nothing more than a pretext to choke ideological dissent.

DEFIANCE AT JADAVPUR

The frontline of physical resistance formed at Jadavpur’s 8B bus stand, where the state’s authoritarian impulse collided directly with organised popular defiance. Despite the organisers having obtained electrical permits, notified the police, and paid municipal taxes, civic authorities and law enforcement arrived with a heavy bulldozer to crush the stall. Instead of retreating, Left activists, students, and local citizens formed a tight human chain before the vehicle's shovel, singing the national anthem until the machine was forced to withdraw.

Led by state leaders such as Biman Bose, Kallol Majumder, Srijan Bhattacharya, and Sudip Sengupta, and supported by cultural figures like Sabyasachi Chakraborty, this collective act transformed a temporary stall into an enduring symbol of resistance against administrative coercion. Although a legal challenge brought before the Calcutta High Court was subsequently dismissed without the immediate publication of detailed reasoning, the moral and political victory remained firmly on the street, where mass mobilisation thwarted the physical destruction of literature.

STATEWIDE REACTIONARY VANDALISM

The confrontation at Jadavpur was merely one chapter in a statewide pattern of organised disruption. In Ashoknagar, saffron cadres attacked a stall, tearing apart flex banners and vandalising a Ganashakti display, culminating in a clash where a police sub-inspector was injured and a party activist was taken into custody. At Howrah’s Chatterjeehat, a stall operating for nearly six decades on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay Road was ransacked by reactionaries posing as buyers. Books authored by Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay were hurled into the mud.

Rather than ceding ground, party workers retrieved the soiled volumes, placed them on bare wooden tables and resumed sales under the open sky. Reports of intimidation and obstruction poured in from Rajarhat, Thakurpukur, Khidirpur, Sinthee, Bongaon, Berhampore, Bardhaman and Chinsurah, demonstrating an orchestrated effort to choke the public circulation of critical literature. Former legislator Satyasebi Kar defended the elementary principle of democracy, demanding that political disagreements be met with counter-arguments and competing literature, rather than administrative intimidation and physical terror.

CULTURAL SOLIDARITY

Prominent figures across Bengal's cultural and intellectual community, including actors Ritwik Chakraborty, Sudipta Chakraborty, Neel Dutt and Riddhi Sen; theatre director Saurav Palodhi; singer Rupam Islam; and acclaimed filmmaker Kamaleshwar Mukhopadhyay, publicly condemned the state's bullying, declaring that no civilised society deploys bulldozers against literature. They voiced alarm over the creeping culture of fear and censorship, urging the democratic public not to surrender the open space of discourse.

The public delivered its own verdict on the streets. At College Square, the Bharat Bhabna (Idea of India) section, organised specifically to defend constitutional secularism and national solidarity against communal polarisation, drew unprecedented crowds alongside expanding sections dedicated to progressive children's literature. Sales at Jadavpur crossed Rs.14 lakh, while stalls across the state reported sales figures many times higher than in previous seasons. Working people across Bengal actively countered the climate of hostility by purchasing Marxist theory, classical literature and critical works in record volumes, confirming that the tradition begun in 1952 by the National Book Agency remains deeply rooted in popular life.

THE CHORBAGAN CATASTROPHE

Yet, while the police and municipal machinery mobilised enormous resources to harass bookstalls, the state completely abandoned its primary obligation to safeguard human life. At Chorbagan, nineteen festival-goers were crushed to death in an entirely man-made catastrophe, marking perhaps the darkest disaster in the modern history of the festival. While festival crowds were funnelled into the pandal through wide entranceways, egress was restricted to a choked, narrow passage that created a fatal bottleneck.

When sudden autumn rains drove thousands of people toward the structure for shelter, the opposing flows of people collided in a confined bottleneck. Decades of pedestrian dynamics and crowd science—pioneered by researchers like John J. Fruin and Dirk Helbing—have established that when crowd density exceeds safe thresholds in constrained spaces, physical autonomy collapses, creating shockwaves and compressive asphyxia. The disaster at Chorbagan was not an act of nature; it was the direct outcome of an administration that permits massive, commercialised spectacles without enforcing crowd-density limits, separate exit routes, or emergency evacuation plans.

DEMANDING INSTITUTIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY

Compounding this administrative failure was the near total absence of trained emergency rescue personnel, forcing local neighbourhood youth to pull suffocating victims and dead bodies from the crush. In the aftermath, reactionary elements attempted to deflect accountability by spreading obscurantist rumours concerning the supposed inauspiciousness of the underlying deity beneath the Durga image. A class-conscious analysis rejects such superstitious diversions: mass death in a bottlenecked alley is produced by gross administrative failure, unchecked commercial excess, and the absence of safety protocols, not divine curses.

The CPI(M) Polit Bureau has rightfully demanded that administrative heads must roll, emphasising that nominal ex gratia compensation and ceremonial mourning cannot substitute for criminal culpability and transparent institutional scrutiny. The families of the deceased and the working people of Bengal deserve an unvarnished inquiry that fixes responsibility across every tier of the executive hierarchy.

RECLAIMING THE DEMOCRATIC COMMONS

The contrast between the aggressive suppression of bookstalls and the fatal negligence at Chorbagan exposes the core character of the ruling order: hypersensitive to democratic dissent, but callous toward the lives of the working masses. Bengal's autumn festival cannot be transformed into an authoritarian playground where the freedom to read is dictated by executive decree, nor can mass death be written off as festival collateral. By defending their stalls with human chains and continuing to sell books from makeshift tables, the people and the Left have defended an essential truth: public space is a collective democratic right, and it will be defended through unflinching struggle.