CM Suvendu Adhikari with Sita Mullick on Tuesday
Kolkata: “The chief minister has promised me a roof over my head,” Sita Mullick, a 60-year-old Free School Street pavement dweller, said on Tuesday morning after meeting CM Suvendu Adhikari at a BJP office in Salt Lake. Mullick told the minister the milk was for her grandson. During an anti-encroachment drive in the Park Street-Free School Street area, Paul rebuked her for boiling milk on the pavement.
Mullick had unwittingly triggered a political row on Saturday following a chance encounter with municipal affairs minister Agnimitra Paul.
For the first time in 50 years, Sita Mullick did not return to the Free School Street pavement on Tuesday.
She told him they had been living on the pavement for nearly five decades and had nowhere else to go. “Some Trinamool workers approached us after the incident, but I told them I did not need their help. I have heard about you and wanted to meet you here,” she told Adhikari. “We are looking for a more permanent arrangement for them,” a KMC official said. Mullick’s elder daughter Puja Biswas had earlier told TOI , “My mother grew up here (on the pavement) and we were born right here. Mullick had said the minister also asked her whether she was a Bangladeshi. “I said no.”
We have never received help from any political party or the govt. She was taken to a Kolkata Municipal Corporation-run shelter in Beleghata for some time.
On Tuesday, Mullick, who said she had been staying on the pavement for 50 years, waited patiently outside the BJP office with her grandchild for an audience with the CM.
The opposition was quick to launch an attack on BJP, pointing out that “one is not poor by choice”. Sources said BJP workers took her to meet Adhikari. A video of the exchange went viral. Many also forwarded a poem penned by Srijato on the incident. Former CM Mamata Banerjee , too, weighed in, promising to help Mullick and fund the education of her children.