Kolkata: Fresh FIR lodged against poet Srijato for his controversial Facebook poem

According to reports, a resident of Kolkata's Salt Lake area, Biplab Choudhury, lodged the FIR against Srijato at Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate on Wednesday.

"I went to Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate to lodge a complaint against Srijato Bandyopadhyay earlier on March 21, but police refused to take it," complainant Biplab Choudhury told IBNS.

"Then I move to Barrackpore court and the judge directed Bidhannagar City Police to register my complaint and to probe the matter," Choudhury added.

After the FIR was lodged, police have started investigation into it and charged Srijato Bandyopadhyay under two non-bailable IPC sections, including 153A (Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony) and 153B (Imputations, assertions prejudicial to national-integration), and bailable IPC section 500 (Defamation), a senior police official told IBNS.

Complainant Biplab Choudhury said that he would move to Calcutta High Court if police don't take any action against the poet in next 15 days.

After Yogi Adityanath was selected as the Chief Minister of newly elected BJP-led government in Uttar Pradesh, poet Srijato wrote a poem and posted it on his Facebook wall on Mar 23 late evening.

Alleging that few stanzas of the poem are harmful for religious sentiment, two FIRs were lodged against the Kolkata-based poet earlier in March at Siliguri Metropolitan Police's cyber crime cell and Ghola Police Station in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district, according to reports.

Meanwhile, during a show in a private TV news channel, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that anything, which could hamper the freedom of speech, will not happen with Srijato as he did nothing wrong or illegal.

(Reporting by Deepayan Sinha)