New Delhi: The Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Wednesday alleged that “goons” from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) attacked and vandalized a statue of communist icon Vladimir Lenin in Murshidabad district, where the saffron party’s Gouri Sankar Ghosh won the assembly elections by a margin of over 30,000 votes.The party said it lodged a complaint with police, leading to five arrests, and vowed to rebuild the statue on May 8.“On the evening of May 5, PPP goons attacked and smashed the Lenin statue in Jiaganj area of ​​Murshidabad district. Our comrades responded immediately and reported the incident to the police. A demonstration was held, following which five people were arrested. This morning, our comrades went to the site again. The statue will be rebuilt on May 8,” the party posted on X.Vladimir Lenin was a Russian revolutionary who led the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and founded the Soviet Union, becoming one of the most influential communist leaders and overwhelmingly influential in West Bengal politics under the CPM regime, which was uprooted by the TMC’s Mamata Banerjee in 2011.On May 4, the BJP repeated the U-turn in similar fashion, defeating the ruling Trinamool by winning 207 of the 294 seats in the Bengal Assembly and garnering 45.8% of the vote.Since the verdict, a series of violence has broken out across the state, leaving at least four people dead and dozens injured, with party offices looted and rival cadres from the Trinamool Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party clashing overnight in several areas.Two deaths were reported in Kolkata within 24 hours. In Belegatta, 45-year-old Trinamool poll agent Biswajit Pattanaik was found bleeding as he stepped out of his house after receiving a call. Police suspect he was chased, tried to escape from the roof and fell, but his family said he was dragged out and beaten.In 2018, two Lenin statues were pulled down in the southern state of Tripura, just days after the Left was defeated in the assembly polls by the BJP and its ally IPFT, which won a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives in a state where the CPI(M) had been in power for 25 years.A five-foot-tall fiberglass statue of Lenin was toppled in Bellonia, while a smaller statue was razed to the ground in Sabrum two days earlier.
