Bengali Pride

Bengali speaking people of West Bengal want to enjoy the reflected glory from Bangladesh on 21 February on a wrong premise.

BJP can never come to power in West Bengal because of this large chunk of Hindu Bengali of the state who hates Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and BJP for no good reason and feel attached with Muslims of Bangladesh.

They can love Jinnah and Suhrawardi, but will keep on hating Shyama Prasad Mookerjee for no good reason.

To talk of ‘Bengali identity’ by bringing the Hindus and Muslims of West Bengal (and Bangladesh) together is not only false, but also ludicrous.

Modi-Shah did not know that a good proportion of Hindu Bengali of West Bengal would prefer to align with Muslim Bengali of Bangladesh than with Hindus of Bihar and UP.

Mamata Banerjee who has successfully led AITC since 1998, really needs an outsider like Prashant Kishor?

The subtle sermonizing on our festivals was not enough, that now the backdrop of our festivals has again become an opportunity for some to divide us on linguistic fault lines.

Prima Facie, it would look like any regional linguistic movement, like Shiv Sena's Marathi Maanoos (Person) and Marathi Asmita (Pride) movement, or Tamizh Pride that Dravidian Parties project. But if we scratch the surface we will observe that it is a very smartly devised separatist movement under the guise of linguistic regionalistic sub-nationalism.

The opposition and left don’t or, perhaps, do realize that their cheap and dangerous politics instigating religious violence is creating a fissure between Hindus and Muslims and it will not easily heal.

Monobina Gupta, Managing Editor of The Wire, has exclusively written a piece assessing the possibility of linguistic 'Bangla nationalism' the key driver leading to the creation of Bangladesh, as a counter to what she calls 'Hindi-Hindu nationalism'.