Editor,
Kudos to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for speaking the obvious, ie, “BJP, Bengal do not match in wavelength.”
Apart from being involved in the vandalisation of the Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar bust, the bhakt brigade was audacious enough to malign Raja Rammohan Roy as a ‘chamcha’ of the British; the great humanitarian, Amartya Sen, gets character-assassinated as a ‘land-grabber’; and a festival as secular and traditional as the Bengali Nababarsha could be dramatically referred as ‘Hindu New Year’ overnight, just to dissociate our Bengali Muslim cousins from the festival.
Yes, Bengal is that land where Muslims donate land to build Durga temple, show light to the Devi during immersion, carry the dead of Hindu neighbours, and where Hindus part with land to set up graveyards, and offer sehri and iftar during Ramadan to Islamic brethren.
Bengal is the land of Swami Vivekananda, who had initiated Kumari Puja by worshipping a Kashmiri Muslim girl at the Kheer Bhawani temple, and of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who had stressed: “As many opinions, so many ways,” in terms of attaining the divine.
This is the moral and humanitarian height of Bengal which the BJP would never succeed to envisage. This is the reason why, despite unleashing state power for months, the BJP received a severe thrashing by the Bengal electorate in the 2021 assembly polls right on the 100th birthday of Satyajit Ray, who had always spoken against communalism through iconic films like Ghare Baire and Agantuk.
So, instead of character-assassinating West Bengal out of sheer hatred and revenge, the BJP should learn the essence of humanity from Bengal.
Kajal Chatterjee,
D-2/403,
Peerless Nagar,
Kolkata