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Durgapur (Bengal): During the night of August 26, a life-size stone statue of Jawaharlal Nehru, installed behind a primary school on Harshabardhan Road in Durgapur, one of eastern India’s major industrial cities, was uprooted with the help of a crane and dumped in a nearby bush.

For many residents of Durgapur, Nehru’s memory is closely associated with the city’s industrial history and its emergence as a major industrial hub.

The following day, protests took place. Eventually, the authorities retrieved the statue from the bush and reinstalled it at the very spot from where it had been removed.

Yet, despite the uproar, police have so far failed to identify or arrest anyone in connection with the incident.

Locals have alleged that the vandalism could not have taken place without political patronage.

This is the latest in a series of statue vandalisms and removals in Bengal since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power. A statue of Lenin was vandalised in Jangipur of Murshidabad. At Vidyasagar University in Medinipur, portraits of Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and Rabindranath Tagore were destroyed. In Raniganj, a statue of labour icon Rahul Sankrityayan was removed. In south Kolkata, the arm of a statue of Netaji Subas Chandra Bose was broken.

Across the industrial city of Durgapur, statues of some of India’s most well known political, social,........

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