Kolkata: The advertisement, numbered ICA-D1350(23)/2026, carried the national emblem, the faces of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, and an invitation to the Durga Puja 2026 preparation and coordination meeting at Milan Mela on 7 September. It was organised by Kolkata Police and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation with help from the Information and Culture Department. Twice it described Durga Puja as Bengali’s greatest festival. It also carried a graphic of the goddess with eleven hands. The Bengal government ad which shows the Durga idol with eleven hands.Bengal’s grandest festival is undoubtedly the Durga Puja which is the celebration of the Dashabhuja, the ten-armed deity. Every arm holds a weapon or celestial item given by a particular god. Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s voice, in the iconic Mahishasuramardini, has been reciting that inventory at four on Mahalaya morning for close to a century. The arms are one of the first things that a child learns to count when she is standing in front of the idol, in a pandal.Adhikari opened the Milan Mela meeting with an apology, and said the agency that prepared the advertisement had been cautioned. He promised that the Bengal government would be careful with such cases in the future. Samik Bhattacharya, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s state president, said a graphic error by an agency should not be turned into a political issue and would be rectified promptly.An agency did get it wrong, and agencies do get things wrong. But one assumes that an eleventh arm has to clear a good many desks in the Information and Culture Department before it runs under the national emblem, and at none of them did anyone notice.However, while an apology was made within a few hours for an extra arm on the image of a goddess, what was said from a stage the chief minister was on three days earlier has not been brought up by Adhikari, although many would argue that it too demands administrative attention.On that stage, the self-professed spiritual leader Dhirendra Krishna Shastri or Bageshwar Dham Sarkar asked Hindus in Kolkata to break the bones of Bengalis who cook fish behind their Durga Puja pandals. No case has been registered at any police station in West Bengal against this incitement.Today, September 10, however, Adhikari said that whoever burnt Shastri’s photos in protest and asked for an FIR against him will be arrested. Speaking in the West Bengal assembly, the chief minister said, “I have directed the CP [commissioner of police] that everyone who burnt the [Shastri’s] picture should be arrested.”A week earlier, a case had been registered over two words – the Bengali for ‘saffron hooliganism’. On August 27, a saffron-clad man complained to Bowbazar police station that his religious sentiments had been hurt by this headline in Anandabazar Patrika. At half past two the following afternoon, an FIR was registered against two of the paper’s journalists and the unnamed remainder of its editorial desk, under Sections 196 and 299 of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita which refer to the promotion enmity on grounds of religion, and deliberate acts intended to outrage religious feelings. Both are cognisable and non-bailable. The headline had described an attack on Jadavpur University by ABVP supporters. Both journalists have been summoned.It is clear to see which words the state machinery treats as actionable, and the speakers of which other words it seats on a pedestal.Shastri’s address at Liluah in Howrah began on September 4. Adhikari went, handed him a golden mace and recited the Hanuman Chalisa beside him. From that stage the chief minister attacked what he called the appeasement politics of the past, invited Shastri to address a gathering at the Brigade Parade Ground, and spoke about his plans for a Uniform Civil Code.The next evening, Shastri was at Soujanya, the state guest house at Kolkata’s Alipore. It was the 120th day of Suvendu Adhikari’s government. Dinner was served on copper-tin thalis, Most ministers present sat cross-legged on a white cloth on the floor. Dressed in traditional clothes and saffron scarves, they ate with their plates and water bottles arranged before them. There is no indignity in that. A pangat works on the principle that the ground is where everyone eats – minister, cook and ordinary alike – and that nobody is served at a greater height than anyone else. Dhirendra Shastri and CM Suvendu Adhikari with others, eating at Soujanya, the state guest house.In the photographs posted by the chief minister’s own official social media account, two men are at a greater height than everyone else. Adhikari and Shastri sit above the room on a low white mattress, thalis before them. Chief Secretary Manoj Kumar Agarwal, Home Secretary Sanghamitra Ghosh and Director General of Police Siddhinath Gupta were also seen at the venue.It was on Sunday, the last day of his tour, that Shastri turned to Bengali food.“Buraa na maanna (not to offend),” he began. “There is one thing about West Bengal I do not like at all. It wounds the heart. When Navratri comes here and the Durga pandals are put up, behind the pandal, or under the platform, non-vegetarian food is eaten. Filthy food is cooked back there. We do not like this. We want that this Navadurga, every last Hindu in Calcutta should wake up and boycott such people and break their bones. And you say they should be called religious. We will not call them religious. They will be called imposters.”The word Shastri used for ‘imposter’ was ‘pakhandi’, and in a religious register it carries the charge of false piety. NFHS-5 records that between 98.5% and 99.3% of adults in West Bengal eat fish, meat or eggs at least occasionally, the figure varying slightly between women and men. The survey measures habit rather than what is cooked behind any particular pandal. But Shastri was not describing a minority within Bengali Hinduism, or a lapse at the margins of it. By his own account, he was describing Bengalis.But it is not about another speech prosecution. Sections 196 and 299, like the 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code they replaced, are among the most casually invoked provisions in the country, and the remedy for their misuse is not more of it. The Supreme Court has said as much repeatedly. On the standard the police applied at Bowbazar, an accurate two-word description of an assault on a university does not come close.And this is the point. Shastri spoke to a mass gathering, 48 hours after the chief minister garlanded him and less than 24 hours after the state’s senior-most civil servants bowed before him. Dhirendra Shastri with CM Suvendu Adhikari and top state officials.In the 10 days between the FIR at Bowbazar and the meeting at Milan Mela, and especially today, Bengal acquired a working test for whose religious feelings are actionable. It is not written in the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita. It is written in who gets the mace and who gets the summons.