A former Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Assam’s Bengali-speaking Barak Valley hit out at party leader Amit Malviya for his take on Sylheti, a variant of Bengali.
Defending a recent Delhi Police communique seeking the “translation of documents containing text in Bangladeshi language”, Mr. Malviya, who heads the BJP’s information technology cell, said the Sylheti dialect of Bengali was “nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis”.
Taking to social media, the BJP’s former Silchar MP, Rajdeep Roy, wrote: “Sylheti is far older than the modern state of Bangladesh, or even East Pakistan. It transcends the borders and histories of today’s political entities.”
Pointing out that Sylheti is the lingua franca of Barak Valley, Mr. Roy said that more than 70 lakh people in Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura speak it. He said dismissing Sylheti as alien to Bengalis in India was “inaccurate, deeply unfortunate, and condemnable”.
The former MP also reminded Mr. Malviya that some of the historical figures that the BJP reveres spoke Sylheti. They include Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the founder of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, and Bipin Chandra Pal, one of the Lal-Bal-Pal trio of India’s freedom movement.
