TMC furious after Delhi Police seeks translator for 'Bangladeshi language' Bangla, Mahua asks ‘how dare you'
"The identification documents contain texts written in Bangladeshi and are needed to be translated to Hindi and English. Now, for the investigation to proceed further it is requested that an official translator/interpreter in Bangladeshi national language may kindly be provided," reads the letter issued from Lodhi Colony police station to Banga Bhawan.
The letter, which has now been widely circulated on social media, has triggered backlash, mainly from the All India Trinamool Congress.
TMC fumes at Delhi Police's letter
"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!! " read a post shared by West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
This row comes amid the ongoing dispute over third language in the country. The TMC has accused the Home Ministry of "delegitimising" one of the mother tongues of the country.
In a video on X, TMC MP Mahua Moitra also questioned the move and accused the Home Ministry of erasing one of the 22 official and 11 classical languages.
'Bangla is spoken by 25 crore people globally. It is one of 22 constitutionally recognised languages in India... To call this a Bangladeshi language on official documentation is a calculated action. We demand an unconditional apology from the Delhi Police,' said Moitra on X.
As TMC continues to fume over the letter, MP Kunal Ghosh has accused the BJP of pushing an anti-Bengali agenda.
"@AmitShah's @DelhiPolice is deliberately targeting the Bengali language. By falsely branding Bengali as a "Bangladeshi language" — the @BJP4India is pushing its anti-Bengali agenda to DANGEROUS EXTREMES," the TMC MP was quoted as saying at a press conference on Sunday.
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Indian Express
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Why Sylheti is not a ‘Bangladeshi language'
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The primary argument for referring to Sylheti as a dialect of Bengali — and not a language in its own right — is mutual intelligibility, that is, speakers of both tongues understand each other. However, there is significant scholarly disagreement on the matter. 'The claim of mutual intelligibility by some speakers of both Sylheti and Bengali may be more an effect of the speakers' exposure to both languages,' linguists Candide Simard, Sarah M Dopierala, and E Marie Thaut wrote in 'Introducing the Sylheti language and its speakers' (2020). 'Sylheti-speaking areas of Bangladesh and India are characterised by diglossia, where standard Bengali is the language of education and literacy and Sylheti is the vernacular variety used in everyday interactions,' the linguists wrote. Speakers on both sides of the border nonetheless have a strong affinity to the Bengali language, and often identify as Bengali themselves. 'Families such as mine also speak Sylheti. 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In the initial years after Partition, a wave of Hindu Sylheti refugees settled in this region. The story of Sylheti migration to parts of present-day Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, however, is even older. Dasgupta wrote about 'Sylheti Hindu bhodrolok' who were 'economic migrants' across the region. 'Sylheti middle-class economic migrants to the Brahmaputra Valley and Cachar areas were a population in motion in colonial Assam, moving back and forth, many with simultaneous homes in both Sylhet and the Brahmaputra Valley districts and Cachar since the late nineteenth century,' she wrote in 'Denial and resistance: Sylheti Partition 'refugees' in Assam' (2001). The Census of 1901 noted that 'Sylhetis who are good clerks and are enterprising traders are found, in small numbers, in most of the districts of the province [Assam]'. There was thus a significant population of Sylhetis in what is now India well before East Pakistan, let alone Bangladesh, was even imagined. 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Indian Express
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West Bengal: Tension in Barasat after clashes break out during Suvendu Adhikari's rally
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Hindustan Times
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Ex-Indian who became Canadian now eyes permanent return to India: ‘Biggest mistake of my life'
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