Woman shot at after argument over sharing pizzas in Delhi; 4 held
New Delhi, Oct 17: A woman was shot at by her sister-in-law's brother following a heated argument over sharing pizzas in northeast Delhi's Welcome area, police said on Thursday.
Four people have been arrested in connection with the incident which took place on Wednesday night, they said.
The matter came to light after Seelampur police station received information from GTB Hospital that a woman, Saadma, was brought to the facility with a gunshot injury, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Northeast) Rakesh Paweria said.
"Initial investigation revealed that the victim's brother-in-law Zeeshan brought pizzas for the entire family on Wednesday. He gave them to everyone in the family, including Saadma, the wife of his younger brother Javed," the DCP said.
Zeeshan's wife Saadiya, who had a dispute with Saadma, got upset over her husband sharing food with her sister-in-law and this led to a fight between the three, the officer said.
"At night, Saadiya called her four brothers -- Muntahir (35), Tafseer (28), Shahzad (22) and Gulrej (31) -- to her home. Her brothers had an argument with her in-laws. During the argument, Muntahir fired a shot and the bullet hit Saadma," the DCP said.
Saadma sustained a bullet injury in her stomach and is undergoing treatment at the GTB Hospital. Her condition is stated to be stable, he said.
The police have arrested Muntahir, Tafseer, Shahzad and Gulrej, and recovered one pistol, four live cartridges and one empty shell from them, he added.
"We are probing the matter from all angles. We are recording statements of the family members. Further investigation is underway," the officer said.
Describing the incident, one of the victim's family members said Zeeshan was distributing food when Saadiya allegedly objected.
"A fight erupted between Zeeshan, Saadiya and Saadma. Saadiya started smashing Saadma's head against the wall. She then left from there and called in her brothers who came from Ghaziabad. Her brothers abused all the family members and one of them shot Saadma," he said.
Listening to the gunshots, many neighbours gathered at the spot and locked Saadiya's brothers in a room, which led to their arrest.
"One of the accused who had a pistol tried to run away and opened fire in the air to create terror, but was overpowered by the local residents," the victim's relative added.
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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.
