Travel and tee-off take a haze hit

Fog hung heavy over the Calcutta skyline for the second consecutive day, disrupting everything from takeoff to tee-off.

Eleven flights to the city were diverted elsewhere late on Monday with visibility dropping rapidly because of dense fog. All morning flights were delayed by more than two hours on an average.

Airport officials said flights were stalled from 10pm on Monday till 8am on Tuesday. Visibility had dropped below 50 metres around 1am, forcing the authorities to shut down the runway. The last aircraft to land on Monday night was Kingfisher’s Delhi-Calcutta flight, which touched down at 9.58pm.

The Met office has forecast more foggy nights and mornings as winter sets in after an unusually warm spell that saw minimum temperatures hitting record highs last week.

“Temperatures will steadily drop from now on. The anti-cyclonic circulation in north India has become weak, setting the stage for winter,” a senior official of the Alipore Met station said.

“I am glad winter is finally on its way but the fog is a bother. I am flying to Delhi and am worried that I will miss my appointments because of this delay,” said a businessman who was stranded at the airport for a couple of hours.

Some golfers were also stranded, though not at the airport. Participants in the RCGC Cup, being held at the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, teed off 45 minutes behind schedule on Tuesday because of the fog on the fairways.

“We had to wait for the sun to burn the mist. But we don’t foresee any difficulty in completing the tournament,” said Brandon De Souza, the CEO and managing director of Tiger Sports Marketing.

According to RCGC members, fog is common in December but it has never disrupted a tournament on the greens.

The forecast for the next 24 hours is a clear sky with temperatures between 16 degrees and 26 degrees Celsius. The maximum temperature on Tuesday was 24.9 degrees Celsius, two degrees below normal. The minimum temperature of 16 degrees Celsius was still two points above normal.

Officials of private airlines said fog-induced delays were not only throwing schedules haywire but also triggering passenger protests.

City-based businessman Pulkit Chawla, who was on the Singapore-Calcutta-Dhaka flight of Air India Express that could not land at the airport, said he had a “harrowing experience” in the Bangladesh capital.

“The captain of the flight announced 15 minutes before we were to land in Calcutta (at 10.25pm) that we would be proceeding to Dhaka instead. We had to spend the night in the lounge of Dhaka airport. The airline didn’t even arrange for adequate drinking water,” he alleged. The flight arrived in Calcutta at noon on Tuesday.

Kingfisher, Air India, JetLite, IndiGo and Jet Airways diverted flights to Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Nagpur and Hyderabad on Monday night. All these flights arrived after 11am on Tuesday.

Train services were affected, too. Railway officials said 13 long-distance trains arrived in the city late, the delay ranging from 40 minutes to four hours. The fog-hit trains included the Sealdah and Howrah-bound Rajdhani Express, Kalka Mail, Jodhpur Express and Amritsar Mail. Suburban trains from Howrah and Sealdah were delayed by 40 minutes on an average.

A day after the body of a baby in a shopping bag was identified as Indrajit Saha, the body of a woman in a gunny bag was identified as his mother Bula.

The infant’s aunt Nandita Saha was arrested on Tuesday and charged with murder while the hunt is on for the prime suspect, her husband Satya.

The motive of the double murder is said to be a family feud over property.

The mother and child had gone missing on Sunday morning from their Beleghata home. The boy’s body had been put into a shopping bag and dumped by a canal in Ultadanga. The mother’s body was put into two gunny bags and dumped by the Durgapur Expressway near a plywood factory in Dankuni.

Satya, who has been missing since Sunday morning, works in a soft drinks factory in Dankuni.

Both bodies were found on Sunday but one-year-old Indrajit was identified on Monday morning while 32-year-old Bela was identified on Tuesday night.

“The victim’s husband, Bidyut Saha, identified the body in the morgue,” said Parthasarathi Majumdar, the officer-in-charge of Chanditala police station.

The police station in Dankuni alerted the Ultadanga police late on Tuesday about the unidentified body of a woman. The body had been stuffed into two gunnybags and the two were then stitched together.

“There were head injuries and strangulation marks,” police said.

Earlier in the day, Nandita Saha confessed that she and her husband, Satya, had assaulted Indrajit and Bula around 7am on Sunday.

“She later identified the nylon shopping bag in which Indrajit’s body was found as the one Satya had taken to the market that morning,” said an officer of Ultadanga police station.

Police suspect that Satya, on his motorcycle, had gone to Canal East Road and dumped the baby’s body. He later took his car and took Bela’s body to Dankuni and dumped it off the Durgapur Expressway.

Nandita was arrested under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code and will be produced in court on Wednesday morning.

Indrajit was murdered on his first birthday. Sleuths said brothers Satya and Bidyut had been engaged in a family feud over their ancestral house in Beleghata ever since the death of their father a few years ago.

Satya was allegedly pressuring Bidyut, who works in a Sealdah market, to leave the house. Arati, their mother, would apparently side with Satya and Nandita.

Arati, who was detained by police on Monday, said she had gone for her morning walk when the incident occurred.

A group of tribal women recounted before government officials today how policemen had kicked them and hit them with rifle butts while looking for suspected Maoists after the landmine blast targeting the chief minister in early November.

Sitting uncomfortably on a cushioned sofa at the circuit house in Midnapore town, Chhitamoni Murmu, 40, said she was woken up on the night of November 4 by policemen hurling abuses and ordering villagers to step out. “I knew something terrible was happening. I opened the door and saw them dragging away Shamsher Ali by the collar,” she said.

A labour contractor, Shamsher visits the village twice a year with job offers and Chhitamoni said: “He is like God to us.”

“The women asked the po-lice to release him. But they refused to listen and hurled abuses at us. The police were adamant on taking Shamsher away and we gheraoed them. Then they went berserk. They started beating us… they hit us with their lathis and rifle butts and kicked us.”

A butt landed on Chhitamoni’s left eye. “I fell, realised blood was streaming from my eye and blacked out.”

She has not recovered yet. After several days at many hospitals, the vision in her left eye is blurred. “The lens was damaged,” said an ophthalmologist at Midnapore Medical College and Hospital.

Doctors have told her to protect her eyes from sunlight. For a woman from an impoverished family in a remote West Midnapore village that is a tough ask.

Three days after the alleged police torture started, the tribals formed the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities in Lalgarh and started digging and blocking roads to ensure the cops could not make it to the villages. Among their demands were an apology from the district police chief and a stop on night raids.

A team led by tribal welfare and backward classes secretary R.D. Meena went to Midnapore today to record instances of alleged police atrocities, particularly on women, during the raids after the November 2 blast. A group of 10 from Chhotopelia village, 190km from Calcutta, came to the town escorted by a leader of the people’s committee.

Purnima Murmu, 25, said she was “repeatedly hit” with rifle butts on the chest and stomach. “I still can’t do the chores because of pain,” she said and demanded a job.

The officials will have to go to the medical college hospital tomorrow to hear Panmoni Murmu, 25, whose head is still swathed in bandages.

The committee against police atrocities held a meeting today and decided to keep its agitation suspended for the time being. “But we will start again if the police torture resumes,” said tribal leader Chhatradhar Mahato.

Officials fight

In Lalgarh, district officials squabbled among themselves and almost came to blows following an altercation over procurement of paddy.

Villagers told food department officials led by block development officer (BDO) Chinmoy Mondal they wanted the exercise deferred by a week as many farmers were yet to husk the grain.

Mondal wanted the food officials to persuade the villagers to sell their crop today and an altercation started.

They were on the verge of exchanging blows when subdivisional officer Tanmoy Chakraborty arrived and intervened.