A case has been filed against former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for insulting religious sentiments and making inflammatory comments. On May 20, a lawyer named Rinki Chhetri Singh filed a written complaint with the Siliguri Cyber Crime Police. The lawyer claimed that initially the police did not want to take up the high-profile case. After contacting the police station several times, the police were finally forced to register a complaint.
The former chief minister has been booked under sections 351 (criminal intimidation), 352 (intentional insult to breach of peace), 353 (propagating false or misleading statements) and 299 (intentional and malicious injury to religious faith) of the Indian Justice Code. A senior officer of Siliguri Police said that after receiving a written complaint, the case has been registered at Siliguri Cyber Crime Police Station. He assured that every aspect mentioned in the complaint is being investigated very seriously.
In the charge sheet, the lawyer claimed that the two comments made by the former chief minister deeply hurt religious sentiments. He made one comment during Eid 2025 and the other from a rally in Dharmatala ahead of assembly elections. “When she was chief minister, Mamata Banerjee attended Eid prayers at Red Road wearing hijab and later made offensive comments about Hinduism,” lawyer Rinki Chatterjee told ANI after filing the case. However, in that statement, Mamata Banerjee addressed her opponent that she follows the religion of Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, but not the dirty religion created by Joomla Party, which is against Hinduism. It was the word Gandhadharma, meaning dirty religion, that he used in his Hindi speeches that caused controversy at the time.
The lawyer accused the police of non-cooperation and said that when he first filed a complaint with the cyber department, it was not accepted, which led to physical and mental harassment and the complaint was left pending for days. He added that later, some more statements were made threatening Hindu voters in Dharmatala ahead of the 2026 assembly elections. As a Hindu and a social worker, he felt in danger and at risk of attack. He filed a complaint under various sections of the Indian Justice Code for sedition, incitement to violence and blasphemy. The police initially refused to take action but later accepted the complaint and enforced the sections. According to the lawyer, freedom of speech should have a limit.