West Bengal governor takes Singur detour, officers go missing

Singur: The West Bengal governor’s attempts to engage with the administration failed once again, this time in Hooghly’s Singur .

Taking a cue from their seniors in Siliguri, North 24 Parganas and South 24 Parganas, block-level officers stayed away from the Singur office on Monday as the head of the state came calling.

Block office employees sprung into action at 1.30pm when news reached that governor Jagdeep Dhankhar was coming to visit. They huddled into groups, guessing what was in store. Two of them rushed to the market to buy flowers to greet the governor. Police vehicles, meanwhile, left Singur police station and headed to the block office.

BDO Partha Banerjee, however, was not in. “My mother is sick. I have come to see her. I have taken leave for the day,” he told TOI over the phone. Joint BDO Swapan Ghosh left office, saying “I am going for a probe into a land-related dispute. We have been getting complaints since long.” Only Ghosh’s junior, Mrityunjoy Panja, sat with other employees under a nearby tree and kept tabs on the governor’s movement. They rushed back to office when Dhankhar’s pilot car reached Ratanpur.

A group of children and their mothers touched the governor’s feet soon after he got off the car. He went straight to the BDO’s chamber and sat down on the vacant chair. “Where is the senior-most officer?” Dhankhar said. Waiting at the rear end, Panja stuck his neck out to say the BDO had taken leave as his mother was ill and the joint BDO was busy investigating a land dispute. The governor responded with a meaningful smile.

Answering queries on why he had come to Singur, Dhankhar said: “I was taking rest in Durgapur on my way back from Visva-Bharati. I interacted with the media and also met sections of the public. During my return to Kolkata, I thought of interacting with officers in Singur.”

Around 8-10 people rushed into the BDO’s chamber while the governor was talking to media. Sumantra De Kabiraj, a BJP supporter, drew Dhankhar’s attention to the “sorry plight” of Singur farmers having land in the deserted Nano compound. “We are going through bad times. We can’t do farming on this land. Youths don’t have jobs. Please do something for us” De Kabiraj said.

The governor told him he didn’t have latest information on the ground situation. “I need to study the situation, update myself and come back to you,” Dhankhar said, leaving the block office half an hour later at 5pm.

Trinamool minister Sovandeb Chattopadhyay wondered why the head of the state was doing all this when he was well-aware of a governor’s stature. “Why is he reaching out here and there without intimating the state government? He is not doing justice to his stature,” Chattopadhyay said.