Kolkata, June 21 -- A decision by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) to rename the city's Suhrawardy Avenue after Gopal Mukherjee - a man who took up arms to protect Hindus during the 1947 communal riots - triggered a row in West Bengal on Sunday with politicians and academicians calling it a faux pas by the state's new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

They pointed out that the arterial road in the Park Circus area was named after Sir Hassan Suhrawardy-an academic, art critic and the first Muslim vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta-in 1933, a year after he received a knighthood, and not after his relative Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the prime minister of undivided Bengal in 1947, who critics accuse of engineering ri...