New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Amit Malviya has defended a Delhi Police communique calling Bengali as a “Bangladeshi language”, saying it was “right” to do so in the context of identifying infiltrators.
His long post on X, in which he also argued that there is “no language called Bengali” that covers all its “variants”, triggered a backlash from leaders of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress in West Bengal and the Northeast.
“Delhi Police is absolutely right in referring to the language as Bangladeshi in the context of identifying infiltrators. The term is being used to describe a set of dialects, syntax, and speech patterns that are distinctly different from the Bangla spoken in India. The official language of Bangladesh is not only phonologically different, but also includes dialects like Sylheti that are nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis,” Malviya wrote Monday.
He added that there is “in fact, no language called “Bengali” that neatly covers all these variants. “Bengali” denotes ethnicity, not linguistic uniformity.
He was responding to TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee’s statement that the Delhi Police letter to the resident commissioner of the Banga Bhavan in the capital was “scandalous, insulting, anti-national, unconstitutional”.
“Bengali, our mother tongue, the language of Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda, the language in which our National Anthem and the National Song (the latter by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay) are written, the language in which crores of Indians speak and write, the language which is sanctified and recognised by the Constitution of India, is now described as a Bangladeshi language!!” Mamata had said.
Malviya’s statement, particularly his reference to Sylheti as “nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis”, angered leaders in Assam’s Barak Valley, home to a large population of Sylhetis, who are also present in significant numbers in Tripura, Meghalaya and West Bengal.
In fact, in 1991, Kabindra Purkayastha, whose first language was the Sylheti dialect of Bengali, got elected to the Lok Sabha from Silchar, becoming the first ever BJP MP from Northeast.
Even the current MP from Silchar—Parimal Suklabaidya—is from the BJP, which has won the seat five times since 1991.
“Disgraceful that the BJP’s loud mouthpiece doesn’t know the history of those of us who speak in Sylheti. PMO India needs to sack this incompetent and ignorant bigot. To say Sylheti is nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis is a brainless statement coming from an empty vessel. Sylheti has been spoken & understood across India,” TMC Rajya Sabha MP Sushmita Dev, who represented Silchar as a Congress Lok Sabha MP in the past, said.
Assam Congress president Gaurav Gogoi also slammed Malviya, saying the “arrogance of the BJP” blinds them to the dehumanisation of the Bengali people of West Bengal and Northeast India.
“Today the BJP IT cell insults the Bengali language spoken by lakhs of people in Tripura, Meghalaya and the Barak Valley of Assam. First the BJP asks the Bengali people to declare themselves as Bangladeshis first through the CAA, and now the party insults their language as being foreign. The BJP do not want a united India. They are only interested in re-opening old scars,” Gogoi wrote on X.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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