By Ananya Sharma 
Siliguri, March 8: Nobody told the Santal families who had walked since dawn that the venue had changed. They came the way they always come to these things: in groups, wearing their finest, children in tow, some carrying flags, some carrying nothing but the hope that this time, the government would actually listen. Bidhannagar in Phansidewa was where the conference was supposed to happen. It is a wide, flat stretch of land in the Darjeeling district. Plenty of room. The kind of ground where you can fit a real crowd.
By the time many of them arrived, the event was already underway thirty kilometres away.
That is the detail that keeps getting buried under all the noise about protocol and Blue Books and ministerial lineups. Real people, from one of India’s oldest tribal communities, were shut out of their own conference. And the President of India, who is herself from that community, stood at a half-empty makeshift venue near Bagdogra Airport and had to wonder why.
She Said It Herself
President Droupadi Murmu is a careful woman. She spent years in politics before reaching Raisina Hill, and she knows exactly how much damage an unguarded sentence can do. She does not speak off the cuff. She does not pick fights on public stages.
So when she stood up in Gossainpur on Saturday and started asking questions that the West Bengal government clearly did not want asked, people paid attention.
She said the field at Bidhannagar could have held five lakh people easily. She said she did not understand why the administration shifted the venue. She said it is customary, when the President visits a state, for the Chief Minister and her ministers to come and receive her. She said that did not happen either.
Then she called Mamata Banerjee her younger sister. She said she did not know if Didi was angry with her. She said she had no personal complaints.
Gentle words. But the meaning underneath them was not gentle at all.
Later, she drove to Bidhannagar anyway. Thirty kilometres back to the place where the conference should have been, where the people she came to meet were still waiting. She stood there and said what she had already said at Gossainpur, except this time it landed harder because everyone could see exactly what had been taken from the crowd by a decision made in some government office.
What Was Actually on the Ground
The political argument about protocol is real. But what happened on the ground was more basic than that.
The road used for the presidential convoy had garbage on it. Not occasional litter. Garbage. Sources who spoke to PTI confirmed this and the Ministry of Home Affairs has since sought an explanation from the state.
The washroom arranged for the President at the venue did not have water.
These are not abstract administrative failures. Someone looked at those arrangements and decided they were acceptable for the President of India.
No Chief Secretary. No Director General of Police. The most senior person at the airport to receive Murmu was Siliguri Mayor Gautam Deb. He is the head of a municipal corporation. His presence, while presumably well-meaning, was nowhere near what the Blue Book requires for a presidential visit.
The Blue Book, for those unfamiliar, is not a suggestion box. It is a confidential protocol document that lays out exactly who does what when the President, Vice President, or Prime Minister is in town. It exists so that no state government can claim it did not know what was expected. West Bengal has received presidential visits before. The rules are not new.
The Letter From Delhi
Union Home Secretary Govind Mohan wrote to West Bengal Chief Secretary Nandini Chakraborty on Sunday morning. The letter asked for a full report by 5 PM the same day.
It listed everything. The venue shift. The route. The garbage. The washroom. The missing Chief Minister. The missing Chief Secretary and DGP. And then it asked a pointed question: what action has been taken, or is being considered, against the District Magistrate of Darjeeling, the Commissioner of Police, Siliguri, and the Additional District Magistrate who were directly responsible for the arrangements?
That last part is significant. The Centre is not just asking for an explanation. It is asking whether anyone has been held accountable yet. That is a different kind of question.
Mamata’s Version
The Chief Minister was in Kolkata on Saturday, leading protests against what her party calls the illegal deletion of voter names from electoral rolls. She heard what was being said about her government and she responded the same day.
Her argument has a few moving parts.
First: this was a private event. The International Santal Council invited the President. The state government did not organise it and is not responsible for the organiser’s failures.
Second: her administration flagged the problem early. The district administration wrote to the President’s Secretariat before the event, warning that the organiser seemed unprepared. The concern was also raised on the phone. The President’s advance security team visited the site on March 5 and was told about the issues. The programme went ahead anyway, which Mamata implies was the Secretariat’s call to make, not hers.
Third: she was not on the approved lineup. The Mayor, the DM, and the Commissioner of Police were listed by the President’s Secretariat as the receiving officials. The Chief Minister was not on that list. So she did not go.
She then went after the BJP directly. She asked why the party never raises its voice when tribal communities face atrocities in Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh. She said the BJP was using the President’s office as an election prop ahead of the 2026 Bengal assembly elections. She told the President not to play politics.
That last line caused its own round of outrage. Telling the President of India not to play politics, while simultaneously accusing the other side of doing exactly that, requires a certain kind of confidence that Mamata Banerjee has never been short of.
Modi, Shah, and the Full Volume Treatment
The BJP turned the volume up immediately.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the incident shameful and unprecedented. He said people who believe in democracy and tribal welfare are deeply hurt. Home Minister Amit Shah said the TMC government humiliated the highest constitutional office in the country. Vice President C P Radhakrishnan called it unfortunate and said the President’s office must always receive the dignity it deserves.
By Sunday afternoon there were statements from ABVP, from state BJP leaders, from party spokespersons on every channel. The phrase “insult to the President” was being used in Hindi, Bengali, and English, sometimes in the same sentence.
None of this is surprising. West Bengal votes in 2026. The BJP has been trying for years to make inroads into tribal communities in the state. A sitting tribal President being poorly received by a TMC government is, from a purely electoral standpoint, a gift. The party was never going to waste it.
The Part That Gets Lost
Here is what the noise tends to obscure.
Murmu did not come to North Bengal to make a political point. She came because she was invited to a conference organised by and for the Santal community. The Santal people have been in this region for centuries. They have their own language, their own music, their own way of marking time and grief and celebration. The International Santal Conference is one of the few occasions when that identity gets national-level recognition.
The President of India showing up is a big deal. Not for political reasons. Because she is one of them, in a way that very few people who have held that office have been. She grew up in an Adivasi household in Odisha. She knows what it means for a tribal community to see someone from their world reach the highest office in the country.
Those families walking to Bidhannagar since dawn were not walking to see a political event. They were walking to see her.
They were locked out by a venue change that nobody adequately explained and that the state government, at least publicly, is still defending.
That is the actual story here. Everything else, the Blue Book, the missing ministers, the BJP press conferences, the MHA deadline, is the frame around it.
Sunday Evening and No Clear Ending
The West Bengal government was preparing its response to the MHA as Sunday afternoon wore on. What exactly that response says will determine the next move. If the Centre finds it inadequate, the district officials named in the letter face potential disciplinary action. That would escalate this from a political row into a direct Centre-state confrontation with real consequences for civil servants.
Neither side appears to be in the mood to step back. The BJP has too much to gain electorally from keeping this alive. The TMC cannot afford to be seen folding under pressure from New Delhi, especially with elections coming.
In between those two calculations sit the DM of Darjeeling and the CP of Siliguri, two civil servants who may end up carrying consequences for decisions that, depending on who you believe, were either their fault entirely or the unavoidable result of a private organiser’s failures.
And somewhere in North Bengal, the Santal families who walked to the wrong field on Saturday morning are back home now. The President came. She spoke. She even drove thirty kilometres out of her way to stand on the ground where they had gathered and say what needed to be said.
Whether anything changes because of it is a different question entirely. In Indian politics, outrage has a very short shelf life. The cameras move on. The statements dry up. The files go back into the drawers.
The people who walked since dawn will remember, though. They always do.
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- Ananya Sharmahttps://hindustanherald.in/authors/ananya/
- Ananya Sharmahttps://hindustanherald.in/authors/ananya/
- Ananya Sharmahttps://hindustanherald.in/authors/ananya/
- Ananya Sharmahttps://hindustanherald.in/authors/ananya/
