Situation completely peaceful in Nagpur, curfew lifted: Fadnavis
Nagpur, Mar 23 (PTI): Curfew has been lifted in Nagpur as the situation in the city is completely peaceful, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on Sunday.
The CM was speaking to the media in the Pimpri Chinchwad area of Pune where he attended an event organised by the non-profit Paani Foundation.
“The situation in Nagpur is completely peaceful. There is no tension anywhere. People of all religions are living together peacefully. Hence, the curfew has been lifted,” said Fadnavis, who is a legislator from the city.
Officials said earlier in the day that curfew had been lifted from the remaining four areas of Nagpur, six days after violence rocked the city.
Following the violence on March 17, curfew was imposed in Kotwali, Ganeshpeth, Tehsil, Lakadganj, Pachpaoli, Shanti Nagar, Sakkardara, Nandanvan, Imambada, Yashodhara Nagar and Kapil Nagar police station areas.
Mobs went on a rampage in central Nagpur on Monday night amid rumours that a ‘chadar’ with holy inscriptions was burnt during protests led by VHP and Bajrang Dal demanding the removal of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s tomb located in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district.
Curfew was lifted from localities within the jurisdictions of Nandanvan and Kapil Nagar police stations on March 20, and from Pachpaoli, Shanti Nagar, Lakadganj, Sakkardara and Imambada on March 22.
Nagpur Police Commissioner Ravinder Singal on Sunday ordered the lifting of curfew in the remaining Kotwali, Tehsil, Ganeshpeth and Yashodhara Nagar police station areas from 3 pm.
Patrolling will continue in sensitive areas along with the deployment of local police, an official said.
Large-scale stone pelting and arson were reported in several parts of Nagpur on March 17 after baseless rumours were spread mischievously claiming that a ‘chadar’ with holy inscriptions was burned during the VHP protests, according to the authorities.
Thirty-three police personnel, including three Deputy Commissioner of Police-rank officers, were injured in the violence.
The police have arrested more than 100 persons in connection with the violence.
Fadnavis had said on Saturday that the government would recover the cost of property damaged during the Nagpur violence from rioters and roll bulldozer “if necessary”.
He said if the perpetrators of violence failed to compensate, their properties would be seized and sold to recover the losses.
The CM emphasised that strict action would be taken against those who attacked police officers during the unrest.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
