Kolkata beef food festival cancelled as organiser gets nearly 300 threat calls

Kolkata, June 07: A beef food festival in Kolkata has been cancelled after a barrage of threat calls and hate messages, a spokesperson said here on Friday.

The 'Kolkata Beef Festival' renamed the 'Kolkata Beep Festival' was scheduled on June 23 at a cafe in central Kolkata's Sudder Street.

"We are afraid because everything has been blown out of proportion somehow. Things are not in our control anymore. For all of these reasons, the Kolkata Beep Festival stands cancelled," The Accidental Note, the event organising company, wrote in a Facebook post.

The event management team had put up a Facebook post stating that "one of their team members received over 300 calls yesterday, a lot of them to show support, but a lot of them were direct threats".

"I have been getting continuous calls and had to deactivate my social media account as well. I got calls from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and other places," one of the team members told IANS.

He reiterated that the "event had nothing to do with politics or religion".

"I am a secular person... my food habit says so... I had pork and beef together many times... just for the sake of maintaining secularism," a Facebook user wrote.

The festival with a wide variety of beef preparations ranging from tenderloin, back ribs and Bolognese pasta to burgers 'was aimed to celebrate good food'.

Initially, the organisers thought that planning the fest after the elections they would be able to avoid political tension but couldn't avoid it.

"Most importantly, we cannot ensure the safety of all of you amazing people who were planning to attend and our team", the post added.