On Saturday (October 17) evening, a large police team and officials of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) arrived at a Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) book stall in Jadavpur and ordered it to be removed. The organisers produced their permissions. The order stood. A Sangh stall 20 feet away, calling for a boycott of Marx and Lenin, was left alone.Around the same time, 19 people were crushed to death at the Chorbagan Sarbojanin Durga Puja in North Kolkata. Most were women and children. The first rescuers were young men from the neighbourhood. Some of the saffron-clad volunteers posted by the police were running out as they ran in.Read who those 19 were and try to stay calm. A 19-year-old college student, a tailor’s daughter from New Barrackpore, who had come to Kolkata with her friends for the pujas. A 13-year-old boy from Agarpara who slipped from his parents’ hands in the crush, fell, and was never allowed to stand up again. His uncle found him in a row of bodies, his face crushed under the shoes of strangers. Two girls from New Town, both in Class 11, who set out that afternoon with a third friend to see the pandals. Only one of the three came home. The other two families saw their daughters’ bodies on a video call.They went out in new clothes to see the goddess. They should be at home today, complaining about sore feet. Instead, their parents are collecting them from a morgue, while the government announces compensation and sends its police back to Jadavpur.Five months into its term, the Suvendu Adhikari government could find the men to clear a book stall but not to manage a crowd.Also read: 19 Die at a Kolkata Durga Puja Stampede. Months Ago, the BJP had Taken Over the Reins of the Organising CommitteeThe Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 208 of 294 seats in May on roughly 46% of the vote, after a campaign that told West Bengal’s Hindus that they were unsafe under the Trinamool Congress (TMC). They promised that only the BJP could protect them and their festivals. It did not rest on facts, as expected. Warnings that West Bengal would go the way of Bangladesh or Pakistan relied on demographic claims no census has tested. The last one, in 2011, put the state at above 70% Hindu population. The party’s own state handle circulated a collage of festival violence in which, Alt News found, eight of nine images came from unrelated protests.Durja Puja was the first real test of that promise. Chorbagan, a puja run by the BJP’s own people and blessed by the chief minister himself, showed it failed spectacularly.Footwear lies scattered outside a Durga Puja pandal after the exit gate collapsed due to heavy crowd pressure, leading to a stampede in Kolkata on October 17, 2026. Photo: PTI.Here comes the irony. The party that warned Durga Puja would be in danger under the TMC has banned gatherings of five or more around a Durga Puja. Kolkata Police have imposed prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the BNSS across a wide area around Chorbagan, including Central Avenue, for three days. Kolkata Police’s Puja management was once cited in research papers and management schools. This year the force was hollowed out by transfers and VIP duty, and the gaps were filled with untrained volunteers in saffron. Within hours of the crush, the effort went into managing the story, not the grief.Shortly after the stampede, with the injured still being carried out of Chorbagan, Union home minister Amit Shah arrived in Kolkata. Artists soaked in the rain were lined up to welcome him. It was tone deafness at its peak.Then the chief minister spoke about the bereaved. “I am very happy, those 13 families have put their trust in me, this is my greatest achievement.” Nineteen people are dead, and Adhikari is talking about achievements.The BJP now asks that the tragedy not be politicised. Its memory is short. On March 31, 2016, the Vivekananda Road flyover collapsed in the same Girish Park neighbourhood, killing 26 people. A week later, at an election rally in West Bengal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told voters the collapse was God’s message to save the state from the TMC. By that measure, what message should West Bengal take from 19 bodies at a puja run by the BJP’s own MLA?Also read: North Kolkata Tragedy: Adhikari Must Act Like a Chief Minister, Not a Rabble-RouserEven as the state reeled from the news out of Chorbagan, the government kept sending police back to Jadavpur. Through Saturday night, officers returned to the book stalls again and again, finally announcing that the CPI(M), All India Students’ Association (AISA) and Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) stalls would all be removed. They brought a bulldozer to flatten the stalls and a municipal garbage truck to cart the books away. Read again. A municipal garbage truck was brought in to cart the books away. Students and party workers stood their ground around the books. Elsewhere the methods are cruder. Books have been flung onto roads and kicked about like footballs. The BJP’s state president denies his party directed any of it. Either way, tearing up books has become part of West Bengal’s Puja this year. In early 1947, the Communist Party opened its first permanent book stall in Jessore and five more across Noakhali, stocked by the National Book Agency, which had started in 1939 with Rs 200. The British had already seized and burned such books. Also read: Police Clear Left Book Stalls Across West Bengal as 19 Die in Puja Stampede Amid Thin PolicingA year later, in East Pakistan, the Muslim League government finished the job. As Mani Singh recorded, communist bookshops were either looted by gangs or shut down by order. Germany had shown the way in 1933, when Nazi students and stormtroopers burned Marxist and pacifist books in public squares. The regimes change, but their fear of a book does not.However, as history shows, it has not worked. Left parties report 10% more stalls than last year. Seventy-three stalls in Paschim Medinipur have claimed that they have sold books worth Rs 21 lakh on Friday alone. The 8B Jadavpur stall, under the storm, passed last year’s full-festival sales by Saturday.In Satyajit Ray’s Hirak Rajar Deshe, the king shuts the village school, hunts the teacher Udayan and puts his subjects through a machine that drills his slogans into their heads. At the end, his own people pull down his statue.Nineteen families have paid for this government’s choices. The chief minister has promised a transparent inquiry, and he should be held to it. What it will find was visible on Saturday evening, in a lane in north Kolkata and at a book stall in Jadavpur.