The newly elected BJP government in West Bengal has renamed Kolkata’s Suhrawardy Avenue, a prominent arterial road in the city’s heart, as Gopal Mukherjee Road, after “Gopal Patha”, who is remembered for having organised the Hindu retaliation during the Calcutta riots of 1946. Gopal was called Patha (goat) because of his family business of slaughtering goats. Just five-feet-four-inches tall, he was a local strongman and told journalist Andrew Whitehead in a 1997 interview that he had instructed his men to kill 10 Muslims if one Hindu was killed. He also refused to surrender his weapons before Mahatma Gandhi, when Gandhi called upon people to surrender arms – something many indeed did. Welcoming the announcement of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said, “For decades, a major artery of our City bore the name of someone who wilfully misused state power as a weapon, orchestrating the massacre of innocent citizens for sheer political gain. By renaming it after Shri Gopal Mukherjee, the fearless soul who stepped up as a protector-in-chief to defend and save …