Abhishek Banerjee slapgate incident: Was the attacker an RSS sympathiser?

A day after Debasish Acharya slapped Mamata Banerjee’s nephew and Lok Sabha MP Abhishek Banerjee, the Bengal police have claimed he is an ‘RSS supporter’. However, doubts can be raised over police’s claims of Acharya’s links with the RSS.

Till a day ago, Acharya was being identified as a Trinamool Congress supporter and speculations were rife that he was a supporter of Trinamool leader Suvendu Adhikari, the party MP from Midnapore's Tamluk. However, Adhikari had dismissed all such allegations.

According to sleuths, Acharya had attended an ABVP (youth wing of BJP) meeting on January 2 and spent a substantial amount of time at Baba Ramdev’s ashram in Haridwar. Acharya had even put up at a rented house in Contai, whose landlord is an RSS sympathiser. 

Interestingly, hours after he regained consciousness at the hospital after he was nearly lynched by Trinamool Congress supporters, he said, "I am Khudiram's spirit. I will be reborn. Goodbye Indians. I will come back to serve the Hindu dharma."

"Preliminary examination reveals that he has an ABVP background. He has claimed that he has served the district chief of ABVP for several months. The information is subject to verification and we are yet to ascertain the motive behind such a move by him," said Superintendant of Police, East Midnapore, Sukesh Jain, after he interrogated Acharya at the Tamluk Zilla hospital.

While TMC maintained that Acharya was an ‘outsider’, opposition parties cried foul.

State Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury termed the entire slapgate incident as 'got up'. "It’s nothing but the internal conflict of the party that is surfacing. It's got-up. If the person is not of their party, then how could he manage to get up on the dais amid a meeting when the party MP was delivering a speech? The attacker is very much a TMC worker and this is a result of their factional feud. This will eat up the party like a Frankenstein."

"Just because he has made a comment that links to Hindutva ideologies and lives in a rented house, where the landlord is a RSS supporter does not mean that he is a RSS supporter. This is a conspiracy of the Trinamool Congress to malign the BJP," BJP general secretary, Ritesh Tiwari said.

Meanwhile, doubts remain over whose side Debasish Acharya really is on.