Kolkata: A group of protesters gathered outside the Jadavpur home of senior lawyer and former CPM MP Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya on Friday with cooked pork, questioning his vocal opposition to beef-eating bans.Brushing aside the “pork festival” outside his home as “absurd”, Bhattacharyya called it a “new trend set by the RSS” to malign people when they fail to confront them ideologically.Videos surfaced on Facebook showing an individual named Joyjit Bhattacharya, whose profile identifies him as a digital creator from Bengal. In the videos, Bhattacharya is seen holding a bowl of meat curry, claiming it to be pork, and challenging the senior advocate to come out and consume it if he is truly “secular”.Around seven other people had congregated outside the house holding posters that read, “Welcome to our pork festival.” Joyjit posted on his social media: “Today, we took pork to the doorstep of the beef-eating Bikash Bhattacharyya and — singing songs and extending a warm invitation — urged him to join our ‘pork festival’ to share a meal and send a message of secularism through food; yet Comrade Bikash simply didn’t show up. Is he suffering from an upset stomach? Or did he stay away out of fear that Salim ‘bhaijan’ would make him do sit-ups while holding his ears if he ate pork?” Joyjit did not associate himself with the RSS anywhere in the post.The incident stems from a 2015 controversy when the CPM neta consumed beef during a street protest at Dharmatala. While he has been trolled and ridiculed online ever since, Bhattacharyya remains firm in his ideology.Bhattacharyya said he was at home all day and remained unaware of the gathering until Sunday morning when he came across the videos on social media. He stated that the group merely intended to shoot a video and leave. “Perhaps they thought I was not at home… They cannot change me ideologically, they cannot change me sociologically,” he said. Commenting on the recent trend of publicly shaming politicians, he added, “This is the new trend set by the RSS. They want to malign a person when they fail to confront them, taking it to social media. Nothing else.”On social media, he wrote: “Had they made a little more effort to study Vivekananda, they would have realised there is no objection to eating beef either — though, in their view, perhaps Vivekananda was not a Hindu Sanatani… I congratulate those Sanatanis; they have very easily revealed their true character.”This trend of right-wing groups using pork as a tool for protest has previously been observed in other parts of the country.
