Kolkata: A day ago, on June 21, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation renamed the Suhrawardy Avenue in the city’s Park Circus area, the “Gopal Mukherjee Road”. Bengal’s new Bharatiya Janata Party Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari publicised and lauded the decision on X, writing the following stirring words:“For decades, a major artery of our City bore the name of someone who wilfully misused state power as a weapon, orchestrating the massacre of innocent citizens for sheer political gain. By renaming it after Shri Gopal Mukherjee, the fearless soul who stepped up as a protector-in-chief to defend and save thousands of innocent lives, finally restoration of historical justice will be achieved by honouring a true guardian and savior.”From the public posts of various scholars on social media, it turns out that Adhikari, and the gamut of bureaucrats and representatives in his government, confused their Suhrawardys.Adhikari possibly alluded to the Muslim League leader Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy who was once premier of undivided Bengal and later prime minister of Pakistan. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy is understood to have had a key role in the 1946 Calcutta riots – a fact that earned him the epithet ‘Butcher of Bengal.’Historians differ of the characterisation of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, with one writing on The Wire in 2017 that no archival evidence can corroborate the view that he had asked Muslims to raise arms against Hindus.The street in question, however, had not been named after Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, but after one of his uncles, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Suhrawardy. Hassan Suhrawardy was a famous surgeon and a vice-chancellor of the Calcutta University.“It’s time, West Bengal remembers, corrects and honours the Real Heroes,” Adhikari had written in his X. However, in the process, it seems, his own government has failed to correctly identify the real villain it seeks to forget.The Telegraph has quoted from the famous Kolkata historian P.T. Nair’s book, A History of Calcutta’s Streets, to highlight how the decision to name the road came in 1933, well before the later Suhrawardy’s most politically active years. Nair writes: “The Corporation at its meeting held on Wednesday, March 8, 1933 christened the new (100 ft.) road constructed by the C.I.T. from Park Circus… on which stands the house of Sir Hassan Suhrawardy, Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University as Suhrawardy Avenue.”Nair describes Suhrawardy as “the most distinguished Muslim medico from the point of academic attainments, official position and varied experience in public life.”Nair’s book is also quoted in a fact-check by AltNews, which was first published in 2017, but has been updated with the recent announcements.Since the renaming announcement, several accounts – many of whom are Hindutva commentators – have noted how Hassan Suhrawardy’s achievements are hinged to his unquestioned alignment with the British. Hassan Suhrawardy’s alleged move to hold on to freedom fighter Bina Das as she tried to assassinate the British Governor of Bengal, Stanley Jackson, in 1932 is being cited as justification to rename the road.However, Hassan Suhrawardy’s purported flaws still do not align with CM Adhikari’s characterisation of Suhrawardy as a person responsible for the massacre of innocent citizens for sheer political gain – pointing to the fact that the government representative did have the wrong Suhrawardy in mind.Who is Gopal Pantha?CM Adhikari’s tweet notes that Gopal Mukherjee, after whom the road is to be named, stepped up to protect lives. But Mukherjee, more famous as “Gopal Pantha” because he ran a butcher’s shop, was a character who displays the layers of the communal riots in Kolkata in a deeper manner than partisan politics allows.The Goondas: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld, by Suranjan Das and Jayanta Kumar Ray, which explores police files on the Calcutta underworld from 1946 to 1971, finds that while Mukherjee organised a big resistance group during the communal riots of 1946, subsequently, “during the 1950s, he and his underlings committed a large number of crimes, including dacoities.”The resistance group in question was the Bharat Jatiya Bahani, which Mukherjee organised primarily to protect Hindus during the 1946 ‘direct action day’ violence against them. At one point, Ray and Das’s book notes, it had over 400 activists who had had to abandon quarters in Muslim-majority areas or had suffered “humiliation” in Muslim hands. However, it is also true that Mukherjee’s protection during the riots extended to Muslims as well.Talking to the BBC’s Andrew Whitehead in Calcutta in April 1997, Mukherjee can be heard saying that he also watched out for Muslim residents.Speaking to The Wire in the controversy surrounding Mukherjee after the release of a communal film, his grandson Shantanu had said,”It’s true that during the 1946 riots, my grandfather, Gopal Mukherjee, took up arms to resist the attackers. But he protected people of all faiths, Hindus and Muslims alike.”Das and Ray’s book also essays what happened to Mukherjee and his group when the rioting subsided. They write that the very figures who had been once hailed as saviours from Muslim brutalities were now looked down with social contempt.“This probably induced Gopal Mukherjee and his followers to take recourse to organized ‘crime’ as a means of livelihood. Their involvement with ‘lawless acts’ now ranged from armed dacoities like the Sonarpur Dacoity case and the Guinea Mansion Dacoity case, to armed hold ups, house burglaries, smuggling, petty snatching and thefts.”Many of Mukherjee’s followers, the scholars write, “continued to nurse a deep communal antipathy towards Muslims and were ‘energetic participants’ in the 1950 communal clash in Calcutta.”The interview with Whitehead also notes Mukherjee saying that even Mahatma Gandhi was opposed to partitioning Bengal ahead of the tension of the 1940s. Interestingly, the new BJP government’s decision to observe Paschim Banga Divas on June 20 honours the decision to create West Bengal as a separate state following the very Partition of Bengal that Mukherjee was also against, in his own words.In that interview, Mukherjee says that while he was not associated with any party, he was close to Bidhan Chandra Roy, the Congress leader who was also Bengal chief minister.Due processIn another note, The Telegraph report says that it is unclear if routine process has been followed in the renaming of the road. It says:If the mayor-in-council approves it, the proposal is published in a newspaper giving citizens, scholars, historians and the family of the person whose name the road carries to raise objections.If there is no objection, the proposal is placed on the floor of the House — the monthly session of KMC councillors. Once approved by the House, an official notification is published announcing the changed name of the road.The KMC, however, is in flux, since councillors no longer hold office and no monthly session has been convened since April 30. The Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim has also quit in a situation where it is unclear who from the earlier Trinamool Congress continues to be in the party and outside.