A leader of the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad (TMCP) named AB Soyel stirred the hornet’s nest on Sunday (7th September) after he set fire to a poster of Bengal’s most cherished icon, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore.
TMCP is the student wing of the Trinamool Congress party. AB Soyel committed the act during a protest in the Muslim-dominated Malda district of West Bengal.
During the course of the demonstration, the accused TMC ‘student’ leader deliberately lit fire to the poster of Rabindranath Tagore.
TMC's student leader AB Soyel burnt pictures of Rabindranath Tagore alongwith Modi ji & Amit Shah ji. Is this what Mamata Banerjee calls Bengali asmita? Or is this plain hatred? pic.twitter.com/fejJLNYMH5
— Keya Ghosh (@keyakahe) September 7, 2025
Following protests by the BJP unit of West Bengal, the ruling Trinamool Congress party was forced to expel Soyel from the party. But they made every attempt to downplay his actions intended to insult the Nobel laureaute.
TMCP president Trinankur Bhattacharya claimed, “AB Soyel mistakenly set Tagore’s photograph on fire. When others saw it, they tried to extinguish the fire on Tagore’s photograph.”
BJP West Bengal President Samik Bhattacharya lashed out at AB Soyel and said that his actions were the manifestation of his ‘jihadi mindset.’
In November 2022, OpIndia had reported how a section of Jorasanko Thakurbari, the ancestral home of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, was illegally remodelled into the office of Trinamool Shikshabandhu Samiti.
