Editor,
Bengal BJP president Sukanta Majumdar has very rightly stated that the TMC list for the upcoming general polls has ‘outsiders’.
As if renomination of a Mumbai-based Bollywood star (originally from Bihar) for the Asansol Lok Sabha seat is not enough, an ex-cricketer from Delhi (again with Bihar origin) has been awarded a ticket for the Bardhaman-Durgapur seat.
This again proves that the sentiment and interest of indigenous Bengalis simply count to nothing in today’s de facto ‘paschimi Bangal’, especially where the sons of the soil have been relegated to absolute minorities or entity thanks to the continuous migration from all over the country in droves towards India’s Eldorado named ‘Waste Bengal’ or ‘Kangal Bangal’.
Also, it is highly strange and ridiculous that not a single Bengali-speaking Hindu/Muslim leader or grassroots worker from Murshidabad district has been found eligible to contest the poll on behalf of the TMC in the Baharampur Lok Sabha seat; so it requires an Urdu-speaking ex-cricketer from Gujarat to take up the mantle for the welfare of ‘Banglar Ma-Maati-Manush’. Indeed nothing can be more unfortunate than this.
Except in rarest of rare cases, no party in the whole country offers electoral tickets to candidates hailing from other provinces or affiliated to alien cultural, racial, or linguistic backgrounds. And those rarest of rare exceptions are reserved for one and only pan-India top leaders like Indira Gandhi (Karnataka), PV Narasimha Rao (Odisha), Sonia Gandhi (Karnataka), or Narendra Modi (Uttar Pradesh). In one and only ‘nationalist’ West Bengal, can outsiders, possessing hardly any knowledge and absolutely no knowledge of Bangla and the state’s culture, get regularly nominated and often win polls.
However, it is hard to resist bouts of laughter when the BJP accuses the TMC of fielding ‘outsiders’. Will the saffron party kindly enlighten the Bengalis what the is residential status of the incumbent MPs of Bardhaman-Durgapur and Darjeeling Lok Sabha seats are? What was the residential status of the MPs from Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat who contested and won on saffron tickets in the 2004 and 2009 general polls?
Yes, it is a fact that the candidate whose name was announced to contest the Asansol Lok Sabha seat on behalf of the BJP has been withdrawn, following much hue and cry; but it must be asked how could a Bhojpuri actor-singer from Bihar, notorious for his misogynistic comments and uncharitable references against Bengali women, was considered at all at the first place to contest from a West Bengal seat. All true Bengalis (though they are miniscule in number) are eagerly waiting to see the name of the candidate from Asansol which the BJP will field against another outsider matinee star – whether he is a son of the soil Bengali or outsider with no knowledge of anything Bengal/Bangla.
There lies no doubt in the fact that the Bhojpuri ‘star’ had been brought from Bihar to contest in West Bengal’s Asansol just to counter another Bihari Bollywood star – imported by TMC. And that matinee star won the Asansol Lok Sabha bypoll by a huge margin despite the dominance of the BJP in the seat concerned, winning the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls comprehensively. Yet the TMC had overwhelmed the BJP in that bypoll just because of the masterstroke of fielding the matinee star from Bollywood as all things, persons Hindi/Bihari call the last shot in Asansol. So the BJP had also attempted to implement the same formula by importing its ‘star’ from Bihar.
This means that, despite being a full-fledged region of West Bengal, Bengali sentiments simply don’t matter in Asansol any more. The nomination of an ex-cricketer from Delhi of Bihar background bears testimony to the fact that Bengali sentiments/interests do not matter at Bardhaman-Durgapur too. However, all urban areas of West Bengal are witnessing the same demographic change, whereby the indigenous Bengalis are turning absolute minorities and non-entities in their own land.
So it goes without saying that, in the very near future, almost all Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal will see nomination of non-indigenous candidates by all the mainstream political parties as sentiments of indigenous Bengalis simply count to nothing. What a grim future has the suicidal Bengalis carved for themselves to act as ‘liberal’ and ‘nationalist’.
Kajal Chatterjee,
D-2/403,
Peerless Nagar,
Kolkata