Anandabazar Patrika office pillars painted saffron over newspaper's headline

On Tuesday afternoon, a group of men dressed in saffron robes walked up to the Anandabazar Patrika office near Chandni Chowk and began painting two pillars at the main entrance the same colour. Police from Bowbazar station stood by and watched. Some officers even recorded the scene on their phones.

The demonstration started around 1:30 pm and lasted nearly an hour. The men raised slogans in Hindi and Bengali: “Bhagwa ka apmaan nahi sahega” (We will not tolerate the insult of Bhagwa) and “Anandabazar Patrika haye haye" , “This land belongs to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. This land belongs to Swami Vivekananda. This land is Saffron.” In some videos someone calls the newspaper a “Dimagi Naxal paper” . Police later escorted them away. No FIR has been registered yet over the painting, Bowbazar police confirmed.

The incident came days after West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari publicly demanded an apology from the state’s largest daily. On August 21, Anandabazar Patrika had carried the front-page headline “Saffron Hooliganism: Logo broken during raid on JU campus,” describing violence at Jadavpur University as “gerua gundami.” Adhikari objected strongly. At a Raksha Bandhan rally in Jadavpur on August 28 he said: “I am not threatening the media. But an apology will have to be made. Otherwise thousands of sadhus in saffron robes are getting ready. They only want my consent. I have said [to them], ‘wait’.” He added that the paper could write about “Suvendu’s forces’ rampage” or “the BJP’s rampage” but not use the colour saffron that way. “It has struck many people in the heart,” he told reporters.

The newspaper did not apologise or retract the report. It published Adhikari’s remarks on its front page instead.

Anandabazar Patrika has a long history in Bengal. Founded on 13 March 1922 by Prafulla Kumar Sarkar and Suresh Chandra Majumdar as a four-page evening paper printed in red ink, it was born in the nationalist struggle against British rule. Contemporary English papers called its red first edition a “danger signal.” Over a century it grew into the state’s most widely read Bengali daily, known for its independent voice.

A senior editor at the paper said extra security had been posted at the office since Saturday after Adhikari’s comments. “We had a hunch something like this might happen. We were told not to go to office today. Police officials had come with them and left with them as well,” the editor told Alt News. Most of the men appeared non-Bengali and carried no organisational banners. A few hours after the painting, editor Ishani Datta Ray posted a photo of the pillars freshly painted white again, captioned with a line from Tagore’s poem: “উচ্চ যেথা শির” (Where the head is held high).

Kolkata Police had already registered an FIR against Datta Ray, chief reporter Soma Mukherjee and other editorial staff after a complaint by saffron-clad monk Sanjay Shastri Maharaj. He claimed the original headline hurt Hindu sentiments and disturbed public peace.

Press bodies reacted sharply. The Indian Women’s Press Corps and Press Association demanded the FIR be withdrawn immediately. “We demand that the state and its machinery desist from using tools like the registration of FIRs to intimidate and suppress journalists and instead support a free press,” their joint statement said. They noted the similarity between the monk’s language and the chief minister’s public remarks.
Former journalist and TMC leader Sagarika Ghose called the painting “condemnable in the extreme” on X, asking why police stood by as bystanders and saying Bengal had entered a “dark age” under the BJP.