LONDON: Two groups of protesters disrupted West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s speech at Kellogg College , Oxford, on Thursday night, causing the event, which was meant to be the highlight of her UK trip, to descend into chaos. Oxford’s security officers had to be called. The fiasco began when the CM was talking about the crores of investment proposals that the state had received from different industries and Dr Rajat Banerjee, who drove down from Liverpool, heckled her, asking her to name the industries.
“There are so many. It may be IBM, it may be Tata,” she said, which led to uproar from the back of the room, owing to Tata withdrawing its Nano project from the state in 2008. Sushil Dokwal, a British accountant who had not even registered to attend the event but turned up on the night and got in via a waiting list on the door, and his friend Gujarati artist Jignesh Patel shouted at her “Tata ran way under leadership”.
The pair were there with several others. Next seven Indian Bengali students, not from Oxford, who are part of Students’ Federation of India (SFI), which is politically aligned with CPI(M), stood up in unison at the back, holding banners. One read: “TMC engineered violence in 2023 local elections”.
One shouted out accusing her of allowing Abhaya to be killed. “The case is sub judice and central govt has taken over, it is not with us. Please don’t do politics here, it is not a political stage, you can do it with me in my state, not.
