New Delhi: Ten days after a massive drive to demolish Left book stalls across West Bengal, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has defended the vandalism. He said, “We will not allow anyone to publish anti-nation or anti-Sanatan writings or to hurt any religion, on the soil of West Bengal,” the Telegraph reports. He also used invectives ranging from “cockroaches” to “bedbugs”, “tukde tukde gang”, “dimaagi Naxals” and so on to describe the Left and its supporters.Book stalls run by Left parties were vandalised, burnt and removed across the state during the Durga Puja festival, the first held after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in West Bengal. Bulldozers were used for the task, suggesting an organised effort.Left leaders had earlier blamed BJP workers for the attacks on books, and accused a section of the police of using a narrow Calcutta high court order to clear stalls statewide.Adhikari has now openly backed the vandals who removed the stalls and abused those whose books were removed, even burnt. The Wire had reported last week on how the so-called “clearing of book stalls had taken place:“…an old man behind a bookstall, clad in a dhoti and a kurta, pleading with folded hands before a young goon: “Ektu amar kotha ta shunoon apni (Please listen to what I’m trying to say),” as the violent group destroys the books and shatters the stall with iron rods. The young man is just the tip of the iceberg, the rough-and-tumble militia; state-mandated bulldozers have done the bidding of the official authorities and arrived to raze red bookstalls to the ground with their saffron neighbours standing as sadistically grinning neighbours.”As the state administration focussed on erasing any visible traces of its political and ideological arch-rivals on the Left, its attention appeard to have drifted away from the 19 people who were crushed to death at a Durga Puja pandal in North Kolkata, on the same day.The pandal had been forcefull taken over recently by a BJP-controlled committee, The Wire’s Joydeep Sarkar had reported on October 17, the day of the fatal stampede. This year’s theme was “Beyond Sound,” also replacing the theme the earlier committee had planned.Also read: A Saffron Lesson on How to Close the Bengali Mind“The incident happened after a rain-soaked crowd surged through a narrow exit at a pandal that residents say had too few police, untrained volunteers and no way for ambulances to get in. The residents of the locality where the tragedy struck had complained that there were barely any police to manage the crowd at the stampede site, The Wire in the aftermath of both incidents.”“The chief minister’s public support for the bookstall attacks came days after his own finance minister, Swapan Dasgupta, and party Bengal chief Samik Bhattacharya had condemned the barbarity alongside Jisnu Basu of the RSS,” reports the Telegraph from Kolkata.Adhikari also sought to give the incident a “spontaneous” colour, even though such an incident had not occurred in the past, and Left as well as other book stalls have been a regular feature of Durga Puja in Bengal. Adhikari claimed, says the Telegraph, that “manush” (the people) had spontaneously resisted the stalls, “What they tried to do by setting up those stalls, the people obstructed.”Adhikari did not reportedly say anything about the law and order situation such incidents cause or the steps his government would take to ensure peace in the state.