Kolkata today is a thieves’ garden through which the sangh is stampeding. In Bengali, the words translate to ‘chorebagan’, the name of the community Durga Puja where 19 people have died in a stampede.In that stampede, a seven-year-old was crushed. A woman asphyxiated under foot. Her husband is bereft.What happens in a thieves’ garden? Thieves fall out.Chorebagan in northwest Kolkata where a mural of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was unveiled just over 100 days ago, two months after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s takeover of Bengal, is in a warren of lanes and bylanes leading to commodity markets in Burrabazar. Burrabazar is the largest wholesale market in this part of the world. The pungency of spices – mustard, cinnamon, turmeric, cardamom, dried red chilli, aniseed – that were sold still burns the nostrils from the early 1990s. The bureau chief in Business Standard then, Amalendu Basu, used to insist that I inquire about the price of Sikkim Large Cardamom from the wholesaler in Burrabazar. It was a plod and a pain through Chorebagan. But it had to be done because the pages had to be up to date in a time when there were no mobile phones.Being up to date is what the Suvendu Adhikari government in Bengal has failed in. Crowd-control measures have been part of basic text for the Calcutta Police since colonial times. It is about being in the present while being back to the future. The disaster that has taken away so many lives in the midst of festivity was crafted to be a tragedy.“Please don’t do politics over a human tragedy”, a cousin told me today. The tragedy is entirely political. The orientation of steadfast administration over decades was changed to serve political ambition by a newly-minted saffron minion, Suvendu Adhikari. His acceptance of bundles of cash still bounces around the net.Was the traffic constable told to forget how to direct traffic because there is a saffron patrol yelching by? We don’t know.Suvendu Adhikari’s nephew, Debdeep Adhikari, the chief minister’s elder brother’s son, is “Chief Patron” of the Chorebagan Durga Puja Committee. The state BJP chief, Samik Bhattacharya, called him a nabalok (literally, an un-adult, a juvenile) while there are videos of him dancing in clubs, presumably where only above 18s are allowed. Samik Bhattacharya is fronted by the BJP because he appears to be the bhadralok, in his baritone and Calcutta-pure Banglaspeak.Also read: 19 Dead, Books Bulldozed, North Kolkata Under Prohibitory Orders: West Bengal’s First Durga Puja Under BJPAt Chorebagan, there was a takeover of the Durga Puja committee by the BJP MLA and his associates. Durga Puja committees in my neighbourhood have been or are headed by non-Bengalis, Tamilians mostly, or Sardarjis. It is a part of South Calcutta that is that. The puja my grandfather used to patronise is now in its 112th year. It is older than the RSS or the communist party in India. It was founded the year World War I broke out, 1914.Back to the future. Sarbojonin (community, all-together) Durga Puja in Kolkata has been a fact of life since the early 19th century. Some 150 years later, we trainee reporters used to get bored of briefings given by the municipal corporation and the Kolkata Police headquarters at Lalbazar on the preparations for the puja. Those briefings used to start three months before the festival.“We have always known this,” Debdut Ghosh Thakur, erstwhile colleague, told me during a conversation last evening. Debdut was the chief reporter of the Ananda Bazar Patrika for 16 years. He is now an academic and often on juries that rate the quality of Durga Pujas.On October 16, Panchami (the 5th day of Durga Puja – the festivities begin on the 6th, Sashthi — by the Bengali calendar), he was escorting guests through pujas in North Calcutta. They were at their fourth halt – Chorebagan. Debdut and his guests were escorted by blue-light security that entitled them through the ‘VIP’ gate. Their guide for Chorebagan kept calling the organisers. No response. Then the party decided to move on and visit other venues.In an excellent report for The Wire, Joydeep Sarkar has detailed such situations. Civic volunteers were untrained. A young man, approached a police station in Kasba, in south Kolkata, far away from Chorebagan, presented his Aadhaar card on the recommendation of a BJP leader, was given saffron garment the next day and deployed to Chorebagan.“We always ensured that Durga Puja venues had multiple exit and entry points. The Fire Brigade was always on board. We know Kolkata is an old city,” Debdut tells me.All of this was happening when Suvendu Adhikari’s government thought it fit to have women dance in the rain as Amit Shah landed in Dum Dum and sent bulldozers to destroy books in Jadavpur.The mind harks back to Gujarat in 2002. As a reporter on the ground at that time, I learnt that when security forces finally landed in Ahmedabad as the pogrom was on, it didn’t have the vehicles and maps to go through the city. This is what happens when the simple duty of administration fails to challenge political orientation. The Kolkata Police and civic authorities have surrendered professional duty to prove political feasibility. An 8.5 tonne EXOexcellence 4X4 JCB yellow-black frontloader, otherwise known as a bulldozer, will meet papyrus in Jadavpur, meat in Lakhimpur Kheri and a bookstall on Station Road. There will always be one fact.Thieves fall out. Sujan Dutta is an independent journalist.