Assam BJP leader slams Malviya over ‘Bangladeshi language’ row

A former Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Assam’s Bengali-speaking Barak Valley hit out at party leader Amit Malviya for his take on Sylheti, a variant of Bengali.

Defending a recent Delhi Police communique seeking the “translation of documents containing text in Bangladeshi language”, Mr. Malviya, who heads the BJP’s information technology cell, said the Sylheti dialect of Bengali was “nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis”.

Taking to social media, the BJP’s former Silchar MP, Rajdeep Roy, wrote: “Sylheti is far older than the modern state of Bangladesh, or even East Pakistan. It transcends the borders and histories of today’s political entities.”

Pointing out that Sylheti is the lingua franca of Barak Valley, Mr. Roy said that more than 70 lakh people in Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura speak it. He said dismissing Sylheti as alien to Bengalis in India was “inaccurate, deeply unfortunate, and condemnable”.

The former MP also reminded Mr. Malviya that some of the historical figures that the BJP reveres spoke Sylheti. They include Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the founder of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, and Bipin Chandra Pal, one of the Lal-Bal-Pal trio of India’s freedom movement.

Other BJP leaders in Barak Valley spoke out against Mr Malviya. “Silchar’s incumbent MP, Parimal Suklabaidya, is a Sylheti speaker. So is Kabindra Purkayastha, who became our party’s first-ever MP from the northeast in 1991,” a BJP leader in Barak Valley said.

The Trinamool Congress’s Rajya Sabha member and a resident of Silchar, Sushmita Dev, slammed Mr. Malviya too. “It is disgraceful that the BJP’s loudmouth does not know the history of those of us who speak in Sylheti. The Prime Minister’s Office needs to sack this incompetent and ignorant bigot,” she said.

Assam Congress president Gaurav Gogoi said it was not surprising for the “arrogant BJP” to dehumanise Bengali people living in West Bengal and the northeastern States of the country.

“First, the BJP asks the Bengali people to declare themselves as Bangladeshis through the CAA, and now the party insults their language as being foreign. The BJP does not want a united India. They are only interested in reopening old scars,” he posted on X.

Earlier, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had said that the Delhi Police’s letter to the Resident Commissioner of New Delhi’s Banga Bhavan for assistance on “Bangladeshi language” was “scandalous, insulting, anti-national, unconstitutional”. She pointed out that Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote the National Anthem and the National Song in Bengali.

Pradyot Kishore Manikya Debbarma, the founder of Tripura’s Tipra Motha Party, also expressed his indignation at the letter. “This is deeply concerning. Today it is Bengali, tomorrow it can be any other language. There is no such thing as the Bangladeshi language! How can we forget that even our National Anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana’ was originally composed in Bengali by Tagore,” he asked.