MP minister Inder Singh Parmar’s remark gives TMC fresh ammo to accuse BJP of insulting Bengal’s icons

Kolkata: After Visheshwar Hegde Kageri, a Lok Sabha member elected from Uttar Kannada, a minister of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s government in Madhya Pradesh, Inder Singh Parmar, embarrassed the saffron party in West Bengal and handed over to the ruling Trinamool Congress another weapon to attack its principal challenger in the state.

Parmar accused 19th-century social reformer Raja Rammohan Roy of working as “an agent of the British” and starting a “vicious cycle of religious conversion”. The TMC immediately launched an offensive, alleging that the BJP and its leaders had consistently insulted the doyens of Bengal's Renaissance and the state's cultural and literary icons. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party had recently raised the same allegation after Kageri had claimed that Nobel laureate polymath Rabindranath Tagore had written the Jana Gana Mana to welcome the high officials of the British Raj, and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Vande Mataram should have been the national anthem instead.

Roy, born in 1772 and died in 1883, had fought for the abolition of the practices of sati (burning of widows on the pyre of their deceased husbands), polygamy and child marriage in Bengal. He had been a staunch advocate of the women’s right to education and a strong opponent of the caste system.

Parmar, however, said at an event at Agar Malwa in Madhya Pradesh on Saturday that Roy had, in fact, acted as an agent of the British Raj and had aided in the campaign run by the missionaries to convert Hindus to Christians in Bengal. The higher education minister of the government of West Bengal was speaking at an event held to commemorate the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, who had led a tribal revolt against the British Raj. He said that while Roy and other reformers had been ‘enslaved’ by colonial rulers, Munda had fought to protect the tribal identity.

“Failing miserably to make any impact in Bengal, the BJP has now resorted to its dirtiest tactic, defaming Bengal and the towering icons who shaped our civilisation. From Rabindranath Tagore to Swami Vivekananda to Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, no legend has been spared from the BJP’s relentless insults,” the TMC posted on X, although Parmar later said that the comment on Raja Rammohan Ray was a “slip of tongue”.

The party led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee also referred to the alleged vandalisation of a statue of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, another 19th-century educationist and social reformer, during a BJP rally led by Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Kolkata in 2019.

Vidyasagar had led a campaign to legalise the remarriage of widows in the 19th century. He was also a staunch advocate for the education of women.

Shashi Panja, a senior TMC leader and a minister in the West Bengal government, said that the BJP had always been trying to demean the intelligentsia of Bengal.

“The women of Bengal worship Raja Rammohan Ray, whom the minister of the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh insulted,” said Panja, adding: “If the BJP wants to axe its own foot, it is free to do so; but it cannot insult the icons of Bengal,” she said, claiming that the people of the state are watching the “attack on the pride of Bengal”.

Panja had on November 9 led the TMC’s protest in Kolkata against the comment of Kageri, the BJP member in the Lok Sabha from Karnataka, on Tagore and the national anthem Jana Gana Mana.

“Attacking Bengal and the torchbearers of Bengal’s identity is the @BJP4India’s hateful habit. The uneducated, historically illiterate anti-Bengal party will soon be entirely thrown out by Bengal,” the TMC’s Rajya Sabha member, Sagarika Ghose, posted on X on Sunday.

The TMC had protested after the state BJP heavyweight and Union minister Sukanta Majumdar had said at an event in Kolkata in December 2023 that whoever had said playing football would be better than reading the Gita was a byproduct of the leftist ideology. Though Majumdar had not referred to Swami Vivekananda, the TMC had accused him of insulting the 19th-century monk, philosopher and author, as he had argued in favour of spending more time playing football than reading the Gita, albeit not to dismiss the importance of reading religious texts, but to stress the need for physical fitness alongside.

With the assembly elections in West Bengal likely to be held in April-May next year, Mamata, a few months back, set the TMC’s strategy to counter the BJP’s aggressive Hindutva with an assertive Bangaliyana. The chief minister led her party in launching a campaign against the BJP, branding the saffron party as a “Bangla Virodhi party” (an anti-Bengal party).

The TMC has been stepping up its attacks on the governments of the BJP-ruled states for the detention of migrant workers from the state by police and, in some cases, even deportation to Bangladesh, often in alleged disregard for their claim of being genuine citizens of India.

The party, which has been in power in West Bengal since 2011, launched the second “Bhasha Andolan” (language movement) from the land of Rabindranath Tagore to protest the “linguistic terror” she accused the BJP of unleashing on the Bengali-speaking migrant workers from West Bengal in other states ruled by the saffron party. The first ‘Bhasha Andolan’ had taken place in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1952 to protest the imposition of Urdu and sidelining of Bengali in the eastern part of Pakistan. A police crackdown had resulted in the death of at least 29 protesting students on February 21, 1952. The United Nations later declared February 21 as International Mother Language Day.