Mamata Banerjee has announced a bold decision that ought to have been in place a long while ago. To say this is in no way to debunk the history of British India, when 19th century Calcutta’s College Square was the nerve-centre of demonstrations, pre-eminently by Derozio’s Young Bengal movement.

Political rallies and demonstrations in College Square have been banned with immediate effect, and it redounds to the credit of Kolkata Police that it has been remarkably prompt in its follow-through, making it explicit that no fresh applications for meetings will be accepted.

Quite the most remarkable feature of the chief minister’s announcement is that she has readily conceded to the demand of students who had drawn her attention to the high-decibel noise pollution that hinders the pursuit of academics and the conduct of exams in Calcutta and Presidency Universities and the two reputed government schools ~ Hindu and Hare, not to forget Sanskrit College and Sanskrit Collegiate School.

It is almost as if Kolkata’s academic hub is expected to brazen out the almost perpetual hubbub, indeed the passing show of the political class. College Square has been a threat both to learning and public health as the rallies have disturbed Calcutta Medical College & Hospital no less acutely. Not that the chief minister has never used College Square for Trinamul rallies; but she has been remarkably forthright in her directive to minister Firhad Hakim ~ “You instruct our party that from today we will not hold anything there.”

An equally critical responsibility must now devolve on the Bengal Left and it was rather presumptuous on the part of the CPI-M MLA from Jadavpur, Sujan Chakraborty, to aver that the chief minister is intent on scuttling the Opposition’s political agitprop… after the siege of Nabanna that wasn’t.

In retrospect, the decision to keep College Square out of bounds for the political class ought to have been announced by the CPI-M, when in power, after it had banned similar rallies in Esplanade East. Public meetings in both Esplanade ~ once one of the finest spots of urban landscaping ~ and College Square can dislocate traffic along the city’s arterial stretch, with repercussions further afield.

Given the phenomenal increase in the number of vehicles and the restricted road-space, the city is no longer in a position to suffer an arterial block, almost chronic.

It would be useful to recall that the proposal on an alternate site for political rallies was mooted in the early 1990s by none other then Jyoti Basu.

“But the land in question,” as he would often say, “belongs to the military in a far corner of the Maidan” which arguably is why the essay towards “Kolkata’s Hyde Park” has never attained fruition.

Let College Square be reserved for swimmers and learners.