- Monday, April 29, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
IT is time for Durga Puja, one of India’s biggest festivals, and like every other year, organisers of various pujas have zeroed in on creative ideas to boost their appeal and one of the ideas that they have focused on this year is the recent violence in Lakhimpur Kheri in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in order to express solidarity with the peasant community.
On Sunday (3), a convoy of supporters of the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rammed into a group of protesting farmers to welcome deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, resulting in the death of four. The angry mob then stopped the car and thrashed four of its occupants, including a journalist. The incident led to a massive outrage across the country with the opposition slamming the BJP government of crushing democratic voices under car tyres.
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A big Puja in the northern part of Kolkata, the capital of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal where Durga Puja is a major festival, has decided to showcase the farmers’ problem by exhibiting their protest. They have used various items, including chappals (Indian low-end flip-flops), to give their creative imagination a shape.
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In Dum Dum Park’s Bharat Chakra puja, for instance, the organisers have placed a tractor connected with huge wings bearing names of agitation and agitators on small pieces of paper. The wing symbolised that they want the farmers to fly high and reach their goals. They also put several worn-out chappals in a heap at a side or stuck to the pandal’s inner wall like footprints, resembling a gathering which has been scattered by the use of the law-keepers’ force. It also included 3D and 4D paintings on the wall. A printed car attached with two actual tyres gives the message of the farmers being run over, signifying the recent incident in UP.
The idol of Goddess Durga, who is worshipped during the festival, is placed on a stage that resembles a paddy field, to convey the importance of agriculture and its production.
General secretary of Bharat Chakra puja pandal Prateek Chowdhury told Asian News International, “We have no political motive behind this, we had thought of this theme earlier in September as the farmer protest is not only being talked about in India but also across the world. We want to give social messages through this pandal, as this is the movement which has been talked about and people should know about this.”
Bengal is governed by the Trinamool Congress of chief minister Mamata Banerjee, one of the prominent anti-Narendra Modi faces in Indian politics.
