Kolkata, June 22 -- The Kolkata Municipal Corporation's (KMC) has decided to rename the city's Suhrawardy Avenue after Gopal Mukherjee, who took up arms to protect Hindus during the 1947 communal riots, triggered a row in Bengal on Sunday, with the move evoking strong criticism from the opposition leaders and academicians. "Kolkata Municipal Corporation has decided that the road known as Suhrawardy Avenue in KMC area will be named and henceforth be known as Gopal Mukherjee Road," said the one-line order KMC administrator and municipal commissioner Smita Pandey signed on June 20. CM Suvendu Adhikari welcomed the decision. "...Suhrawardy Avenue will now be renamed as Gopal Mukherjee Road. 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," he said on X. Opposition leaders, however, slammed the move, saying the road was named after Sir Hassan Suhrawardy, the first Muslim vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta, and not after his relative Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who was the prime minister of the undivided Bengal province in 1947, and accused of engineering riots targeting Hindus. Senior Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said: "What we are witnessing is a distortion of Bengal's real history." TMC's Saket Gokhale targeted the BJP. "...Suhrawardy Avenue in Kolkata was named after Hassan Suhrawardy - an academic and art critic who also became the first Muslim Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University...The road was NOT named after Huseyn Suhrawardy who is known as the Butcher of Bengal," he said in a post on X. Political science professor Udayan Bandopadhyay said, "This is a great faux pas by the Bengal government. Sir Hassan Suhrawardy was a noted academician of that era. As vice-chancellor of Calcutta University, he invited Rabindranath Tagore to serve as the Ramtanu Lahiri chair professor in the department of Bengali." BJP spokesperson Debjit Sarkar said, "The KMC authorities can explain how this road was selected for renaming. We are happy that Kolkata has a road named after the man who protected the lives and honour of thousands." Meanwhile, Shantanu Mukherjee, grandson of Gopal Mukherjee, welcomed the government's decision. "My family is grateful to CM Suvendu Adhikari for recognising a man whose role in history was not acknowledged in the past."...