Bengal is having a good laugh at BJP leaders’ faux pas  

BJP leaders’ disconnect with Bengal and Bengalis has been exposed time and again. The party’s state president had once credited Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar for writing Sahaj Path, an elementary Bengali textbook actually written by Tagore. The bust of Vidyasagar had been vandalized in Calcutta after a road show by Amit Shah.

BJP’s belated and laboured attempts to appropriate Tagore, after attacking him for years for allegedly being the stooge of the British and criticising the national anthem penned by him, have also evoked cynicism in the state.

WhatsApp forwards have been distorting history as well. One of them claimed that Tagore was critical of Islam and in support, quoted him as having said, “Everyday, lower-class Hindus keep becoming Muslims or Christians [but] Bhatpara [pandits] remain unconcerned.” What the forward omitted to mention was the earlier part of the sentence in which Tagore had written, “Everyday, to save themselves from social humiliation, lower-class Hindus keep becoming Muslims or Christians …”. It was a critique of Hinduism, not Islam.

Here is an incomplete list of gaffes by BJP leaders in Bengal:

1. Tagore not Thakur: Bengalis have not stopped laughing since they heard a TV anchor and a BJP leader reprimand a panelist for calling Rabindranath ‘Tagore’ as Rabindranath Thakur. Aap naam bhi theek se nahi jaante (you do not even know how to pronounce his name), they patronizingly told the flabbergasted panelist. Tagore was how foreigners called the Nobel Laureate, unable to pronounce ‘Thakur’ .

2. Santiniketan not Tagore’s birthplace: Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while visiting Santiniketan (not Shantiniketan), said that Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Thakur was born there. BJP even tweeted it. There were red faces all around and the tweet was hurriedly deleted. The poet was born at Jorasanko in Calcutta.

3.Students did not turn up to listen to Tagore: RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had claimed that in 1916 on his visit to Japan, students did not turn up to listen to Tagore at a Japanese university. “No matter how big, you are not respected if you come from a weak country,” he had said. Tagore scholars contested the claim and said this was not backed by any evidence. In fact so overwhelmed was Tagore that at Santiniketan, he had set up a Nippon Bhavan for furthering Japanese studies and promote exchanges.

4. Different script: Addressing a political rally at Katwa, BJP national president JP Nadda said, “Mitron, aaj main Radha Govindji ke puratan mandir mei gaya, jahan Chaitanya Mahaprabhu ney diksha li thi (Friends, today I went to an old temple of Radha Govind where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had received initiation).” He was oblivious to the fact that the initiation of the saint had taken place in 1510, a full 329 years before the temple came up. He had apparently picked up the wrong script.

5. It is because he says it is: When protests erupted after the Union Home Minister garlanded the statue of a tribal hunter in Bankura and claimed he had garlanded the statue of freedom fighter Birsa Munda, BJP state president Dilip Ghosh said that since the union minister garlanded the statue, it would henceforth be deemed to be the statue of Birsa Munda.