Gour Sekhar Dey with the defaced plaque on his door.

KOLKATA: The house of a retired Army JCO in Haringhata , Nadia, was vandalized in the wee hours of Saturday after he lit candles on Friday evening in memory of the 40 CRPF jawans killed in the Pulwama terror strike. Warrant Officer (retd) Gour Sekhar Dey, who also served in Kargil for two years during his 35 years of service in the Army, lodged an FIR with the police. The Nadia SP visited Dey's house to inspect the damage.

"My father was in the Army Postal Service. The Army then had a rank of Warrant Officer, which now exists only in the Indian Air Force . We built the house in Haringhata in 2014 and moved in after my father retired in 2016. We had never faced any trouble in the neighbourhood. So it came as a shock when we found my father's plaque defaced with tar. There were also markings on the walls. It seems that some people were unhappy with us lighting the candles," said Dey's son Arunava.

After the Pulwama incident, ex-servicemen's associations had asked veterans to light three candles to pay homage to the martyrs. Dey and his family did so and posted the photographs on a social networking site. The miscreants seemed to have targeted the family after going through these photographs.

"I was awake till 1.30am. I had checked the doors and windows and everything seemed fine. The vandals seem to have struck after that. It was not the work of mischievous children as the tar marks on the walls could only have been made by somebody quite tall. This is quite unnerving. Are there people around us who are unpatriotic or was there some other motive behind this?" Arunava wondered.

A senior officer of Haringhata police station confirmed that an FIR has been lodged. "We are investigating the matter. Nothing more can be said at this point," he said.

