In Rajya Sabha, Union Ministry of Home Affairs rejects Mamata Banerjee's plea to rename West Bengal 'Bangla'

In a setback to West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government, on Wednesday rejected her plea to rename West Bengal to ‘Bangla’. MoS Nityanand Rai in the Rajya Sabha denied that Government has cleared the name ‘Bangla’ for West Bengal as proposed by West Bengal Government. The question was asked by Rajya Sabha MP Ritabrata Banerjee. [caption id=“attachment_6810241” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. PTI[/caption] This was after the West Bengal Assembly passed a resolution in July last year to rename the state as ‘Bangla’ in three languages — ‘Bengal’ in English, ‘Bangla’ in Bengali and ‘Bangal’ in Hindi. Following that, the resolution had been sent to the Union Home Ministry for its approval. The government said that a constitutional amendment is needed to change the name of a state. Earlier, speaking on the issue, Mamata said that she does not like her state to figure at the bottom just because alphabetically it is placed way down the line, and changing the name to Bangla would solve the problem. Previously, Trinamool Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha Sukhendu Sekhar Roy demanded in the House that West Bengal be renamed Bangla in three languages — Bengali, English, and Hindi — in deference to Bengali identity. Usually, West Bengal comes up for discussion in the second half, much after the lunch recess. By the time, the representatives of the West Bengal get to speak, the gravity of a full house is missing, Mamata realised this after having failed to make much impact among the audience in the meeting. “We are losing out on a lot of opportunities,” she is reported to have rued by India Today. Meanwhile, Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday, in the Rajya Sabha, justified sending two advisories to the Mamata government and not the BJP-run Uttar Pradesh where 23 people were killed, saying these were sent by the Centre in wake of the political killings and asserted that it was well within the rights of the ministry to do so.