Kolkata names road after rioter as Suvendu Adhikari mixes up Hassan for Huseyn

Even as a section of people in Kolkata and across West Bengal welcomed the change, claiming that justice had finally been done, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) — currently run by an IAS officer under a superseded board — and chief minister Suvendu Adhikari appear to have mixed up their history.

Suhrawardy Avenue, one of the seven roads converging at Park Circus in Kolkata, was named after a British army surgeon and a former vice-chancellor of Calcutta University. The road was officially named after Hassan Suhrawardy (1870–1946), a renowned physician, educationist, and the first Muslim vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta, who passed away in 1946.

The municipal corporation and the chief minister, however, took Vivek Agnihotri the filmmaker and Hindutva ideologues at face value and did not consult independent historians. Agnihotri and others had in the past objected to the name of the street under the mistaken belief that the road was named after the ‘Butcher of Calcutta’, Huseyn Shadeed Suhrawardy, who was the prime minister of united Bengal in 1947 and subsequently became the fifth prime minister of Pakistan in the mid-fifties.

Husseyn Suhrawardy is blamed for the Great Calcutta Killings, the horrible riots which began on 16 August, 1946 and inflamed Bengal over partition. Suhrawardy favoured a united and ‘separate’ Bengal from India and Pakistan. Suhrawardy Avenue, however, was not named after him but named after his more illustrious uncle 14 years before Independence.

In a social media post on Sunday, Adhikari said, "I commend the historic decision taken by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation yesterday, on the solemn occasion of Paschimbanga Divas, which will help rectify a historical wrong. Suhrawardy Avenue will now be renamed Gopal Mukherjee Road. For decades, a major artery of our city bore the name of someone who wilfully misused state power as a weapon, orchestrating the massacre of innocent citizens for sheer political gain."

He went on to add, “by renaming it after Shri Gopal Mukherjee, the fearless soul who stepped up as a protector-in-chief to defend and save thousands of innocent lives, finally restoration of historical justice will be achieved by honouring a true guardian and saviour. It's time, West Bengal remembers, corrects and honours the Real Heroes.”

Gopal Mukherjee (popularly called Gopal “Pantha”, for the goat meat shop he ran – pantha means “male goat” in Bengali). Joya Chatterji, Professor of South Asian History at the University of Cambridge, was quoted in a report published in Scroll.in in 2015 explaining that Gopal Mukherjee “was a major goonda at the time, who could command a force of around 500 men”. It is at the centre of this narrative of self-defence and just retribution that we find Gopal Mukherjee (popularly called Gopal “Pantha”, for the goat meat shop he ran – pantha means “male goat” in Bengali).

Gopal ‘Pantha’ indeed occupied a central role in the folklore of the city and was believed to have built self-defence groups to protect Hindus during the rioting. After Independence he branched out into real estate and was known as a strongman with protection and patronage of ruling politicians in the state. Organisations like Hindu Sanhati has been taking out processions in the city to recall his heroics with banners proclaiming Mukherjee to be “Kolkatar Rakhakarta” (Kolkata’s protector) and prefixed the title “Hindu bir” (Hindu braveheart) before his name.

An unfazed Adhikari had not deleted his post despite the uproar it caused on Sunday. He obviously cannot back off because of political reasons but has set a dubious precedent of naming roads after a rioter, a first in the city and elsewhere. For votaries of Hindutva, however, Mukherjee is no less than a freedom fighter.

The faux pas has raised questions about the functioning of the municipal corporation. Soon after the assembly election in the state, which was won handsomely by the BJP, the mayor of Kolkata, Firhad Hakim resigned complaining that he was not being allowed to function. The municipal council was soon thereafter taken over by the state government and the municipal commissioner Smita Pandey, an IAS officer, was placed as the administrator. There has been no meeting of the councillors since April 2026 and it is not clear if the Road Renaming Committee, which had external experts, was consulted.

A more practical problem was raised by a resident. “Chief minister sir, if you change the name of this place, all the people around here who have documents showing their address as Suhrawardy Avenue — what will happen to those? Will you personally use your own money to change the name on all those documents, or will they have to go to the cyber cafe themselves and change their documents using their own money?” asked an irate resident.

More importantly, what if the Election Commission of India on a later date find a ‘logical discrepancy’ in different documents showing different names of the street in addresses?