In Bengal, Corpses in a Charred Warehouse, Poems on the Stage
A corpse lies in the morgue
While the glamorous mock.
The two lines are from a poem recited by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday, January 28. They appear in SIR, her latest poetry book, released at the Kolkata Book Fair.
Nazirabad at Anandapur on the suburbs of Kolkata, is a 30-minute drive from Harish Chatterjee Street, where the chief minister lives. On January 26, a fire broke out at a warehouse in the area and spread to the one beside it. It reduced two godowns and a manufacturing unit of a momo company into ashes. Twenty-one “body exhibits” have so far been recovered. Twenty-six to 28 people are still reported missing.
As Banerjee addressed the gathering in Singur on January 28, firefighters were still combing through the smouldering ruins of the Anandapur warehouse, searching for charred human remains.
The fire minister, Sujit Bose, reached the site nearly 32 hours after the blaze, on January 27. Note that this is a journey that takes a little more than half an hour from the centre of the city.
The chief minister, often projected as indefatigable and hands-on, has not been to the scene yet, but has been to the Republic Day parade, to virtual crematorium inaugurations and to her aforementioned trip to Singur where she laid foundation stones for multiple development projects and recited her poems.
Rescue operations must, of course, continue regardless of ministerial presence at Anandapur. But in a disaster of this scale, official statements and honesty are a basic test of governance. Instead, indifference and apathy have conveniently been passed down the line.
It has now emerged that the warehouses, owned by a businessman purportedly close to the ruling party, had neither fire licences nor any fire-safety measures in place. The pattern is familiar. Less than a year ago, a fire in a central Kolkata hotel claimed 14 lives. No accountability followed then, and none is likely to follow now.
The fire minister, known for organising Durga Puja festivities and posing for photographs with Lionel Messi between occasional Enforcement Directorate raids, remains a key election manager for the Trinamool Congress.
So does the mayor of Kolkata. Visiting the site on January 27, Firhad (Bobby) Hakim attempted a familiar pivot, blaming the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government for allowing illegal construction on the protected East Kolkata Wetlands, a protected Ramsar site. It is a bold claim, easily dismantled by 2011 satellite imagery and local testimony. But more importantly, it avoids the only question that matters: Why has his party, in power for 15 years, allowed these tinderboxes to multiply?
Satellite images of the area in 2011 and 2025 (right).
In September 2025, 10 people died during Kolkata’s floods, most by electrocution. The chief minister and the mayor were quick to pin responsibility on power providers CESC and DVC. CESC later announced monetary compensation, and accountability quietly dissolved. Banerjee went on to inaugurate Durga Puja festivities. Hakim returned to managing affairs at the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, much as he did after an illegal building collapsed in Garden Reach and killed eight people in 2024.
A warehouse owner has been arrested. Wow! Momo, a company with a market valuation of nearly Rs 2,800 crore that operated one of the warehouses, issued a statement more than 60 hours later, promptly shifting blame. In a carefully worded note, it offered compensation for three deaths, a figure later echoed by the chief minister at a rally. The rest are forgotten. At the time of writing, no one from the company has faced any legal action.
A heartbreaking loss that has left us deeply saddened. We grieve the passing of three valued lives and extend our deepest condolences to their families. We stand together in prayer, support, and responsibility. pic.twitter.com/fu4ndjjRkP
— Wow! Momo (@Wowmomo4u) January 28, 2026
Meanwhile, at the much-celebrated Kolkata Book Fair, Wow! Momo stalls continue to operate as usual. Perhaps because the dead were migrant workers from the districts, nameless and distant from the city’s moral imagination, there were no candle marches, no sustained demand for justice. On social media, some users remarked that they would have boycotted the brand if only they had consumed its cheap products in the first place. The outrage, what little of it there is, remains safely confined to social media timelines.
At the fire site, families continue to wait. They know what they have lost. They also know that no one in power will be held accountable.
In Bengal, lives are expendable. Power, evidently, is not.
This article went live on January twenty-ninth, two thousand twenty six, at nine minutes past four in the afternoon.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
