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Kolkata: The advertisement, numbered ICA-D1350(23)/2026, carried the national emblem, the faces of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, and an invitation to the Durga Puja 2026 preparation and coordination meeting at Milan Mela on 7 September. It was organised by Kolkata Police and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation with help from the Information and Culture Department. Twice it described Durga Puja as Bengali’s greatest festival. It also carried a graphic of the goddess with eleven hands. 

Bengal’s grandest festival is undoubtedly the Durga Puja which is the celebration of the Dashabhuja, the ten-armed deity. Every arm holds a weapon or celestial item given by a particular god. Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s voice, in the iconic Mahishasuramardini, has been reciting that inventory at four on Mahalaya morning for close to a century. The arms are one of the first things that a child learns to count when she is standing in front of the idol, in a pandal.

Adhikari opened the Milan Mela meeting with an apology, and said the agency that prepared the advertisement had been cautioned. He promised that the Bengal government would be careful with such cases in the future. Samik Bhattacharya, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s state president, said a graphic error by an agency should not be turned into a political issue and would be rectified promptly.

An agency did get it wrong, and agencies do get things wrong. But one assumes that an eleventh arm has to clear a good many desks in the Information and Culture Department before it runs under the national emblem, and at none of them did anyone notice.

However, while an apology was made........

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