A slip of the pen by an inspector of Lodhi Colony, New Delhi, has turned into a nightmare for the BJP in West Bengal, blunting its chances of seriously challenging Mamata Banerjee in the 2026 elections. Perhaps the inspector should have sent that letter to the Bangladesh high commission. But no. The inspector sent it to Banga Bhavan, West Bengal’s state guest house in Delhi, which doubles as the office of the state resident commissioner, and requested the services of a translator for the “Bangladeshi language”. The police, he explained, had detained some suspected Bangladeshis who had produced documents in a language that could not be understood. And, so, the services of a translator, please.
Mamata Banerjee saw red at “Bangladeshi language” -- unquestionably a faux pas as no such thing exists. They speak Bengali across the border as do the people of West Bengal. But the BJP, instead of putting a lid on the debate over the error, tried to justify it – an abomination that would have made even SP Mookerjee cringe. The BJP’s founding father was a Bengali bhadralok whose mother tongue was Bengali. Not Bangladeshi.
For Mamata Banerjee, already fuming at the BJP for allegedly harassing migrant labour from West Bengal in BJP-ruled states, labelling them Bangladeshis and deporting them, it was a heaven-sent cause celebre to ratchet up her rhetoric against the BJP and kickstart her 2026 campaign with a bang.“Scandalous, insulting, anti-national, unconstitutional,” she thundered on X where she shared the controversial letter. “See now how Delhi police under the direct control of Ministry of Home, Government of India (read Amit Shah aka BJP), is describing Bengali as “Bangladeshi” language!”
Now,the BJP could have nipped the sticky issue in the bud, passing off the “Bangladeshi language” offence as an inadvertent error by the inspector. But instead, in an inexplicable act of self-harm, it tried to explain the error and shot itself in the foot. BJP Bengal leaders struggled to contain the damage. But Amit Malviya hit the ball out of the park.
In a lengthy tweet, he said, “Delhi Police is absolutely right in referring to the language as Bangladeshi in the context of identifying infiltrators. The term is being used to describe a set of dialects, syntax and speech patterns that are distinctly different from the Bangla spoken in India. The official language of Bangladesh is not only phonologically different but also includes dialects like Sylheti that are nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis.
“There is, in fact, no language call “Bengali” that nearly covers all these all these variants. “Bengali” denotes ethnicity, not linguistic uniformity. So when the Delhi Police uses “Bangladeshi language,” it is a shorthand for the linguistic markers used to profile illegal immigrants from Bangladesh – not a commentary on Bengali as spoken in West Bengal,” Malviya concluded.
This attempt to justify the term “Bangladeshi language” has not gone down well with many in West Bengal who view it as a slur on the mother tongue Bengali. It is a language for which an entire population fought and won nationhood in 1971: Bangladesh. In the early 1950s, Islamabad declared Urdu the sole national language of Pakistan, triggering protests in the east over Bengali being marginalised.
The language movement that swept East Pakistan culminated on 21 February 1952 when around 30 people died in police firing at Dhaka University. Since then, 21 February is observed as ‘Bhasha Dibash’ or language day on a mammoth scale in Dhaka and, on a much smaller scale, in Kolkata. In 1999, the UN declared 21 February International Mother Tongue Day.
Bengalis in India have their own language day, 19 May, when, in 1961, 11 Bengali speaking persons died in police firing at Silchar in Assam’s Barak Valley while protesting the government’s decision that Assamese would be the state’s sole official language. The Barak Valley, comprising three districts, is Bengali-dominated and protests there against the marginalisation of Bengali forced the Assam government to roll back its decision on its only-Assamese policy.
Just as the speakers of every other language take pride in their mother tongue, so do the Bengalis. It is also the second most spoken language in India after Hindi, the seventh most spoken language in the world and an entire nation was born because of this language. And Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote in Bengali, is the first Nobel laureate from Asia. For literature. He also gave us our national anthem. In Bengali. And Bangladesh's, too.
Now, Bangladeshis speak the same language as people from West Bengal. Yes, there are distinct dialects like Sylheti, perhaps a little tough to understand for the untrained ear but Sylheti is Bengali. Like Cockney is English, though often hard for a standard English speaker to understand. Dialects are defined as "sub-forms of languages which are, in general, mutually comprehensible”. So, what's the big deal about Sylheti?
For the BJP, the defence of the reference to “Bangladeshi language” spells trouble as it reinforces the Trinamool Congress’s charge that the BJP is a party of outsiders – bahiragata – alien to Bengali thought and culture. That strategy worked for the TMC in the 2021 elections and again in 2024. In the forthcoming elections, too, the BJP may have to pay through its nose for failing to feel the pulse of Bengali Asmita and doggedly defend an error by a poorly-lettered inspector who should have known better.