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Bengal governor draws criticism from BJP for praising Mamata Banerjee
The sharpest response to governor CV Ananda Bose’s remark on Mamata Banerjee came from BJP leader and leader of opposition in the state assembly Suvendu Adhikari on Monday evening
KOLKATA: Hours after he praised chief minister Mamata Banerjee for her literary abilities and compared her to Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, APJ Abdul Kalam and Winston Churchill on Monday West Bengal governor CV Ananda Bose faced criticism from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
On Monday, Ananda Bose spoke glowingly of Banerjee at a function where she received an honorary Doctor of Literature(D.Lit.) from Kolkata’s St Xavier’s University.
Bose had said, “We remember Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The Spalding professor of Oxford was a thinker and a writer. We also have none other than A P J Abdul Kalam who gave ‘Wings of Fire’ to the young generation and ignited their minds through his writings. We have the poet AB Vajpayee, in whose team Mamata Banerjee was a member. They are all statesmen and politicians who were writers. We also have Winston Churchill. As the people of West Bengal, we are very glad as we have chief minister Mamata Banerjee in this distinguished league.”
Banerjee has written 134 books, but her work has often drawn criticism from opposition leaders.
The sharpest response to the governor’s remark on Banerjee came from BJP leader and leader of opposition in the state assembly Suvendu Adhikari on Monday evening.
“The St Xavier’s University conferred an Hon. DLitt on WB CM @MamataOfficial. The Hon’ble Governor’s speech on the occasion sounded as if he was rehearsing for the customary speech which he’ll read out at the beginning of the upcoming Budget Session of WB Legislative Assembly,” Suvendu Adhikari tweeted.
The governor’s address to the assembly at the commencement of the first session of each year is drafted by the government.
“I partly agree with Hon’ble Governor’s assessment that CM @MamataOfficial is like Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister responsible for the 1943 Bengal famine; arguably the worst genocide in human history resulting in over 4 million deaths from starvation & malnutrition,” Adhikari said in a second tweet.
CPI(M) central committee member Sujan Chakraborty said: “Many years ago, Banerjee claimed to have received a PhD degree from a foreign university. It later turned out to be fake. It feels nice to see a governor praising her. But is she qualified to receive such honours?”
There was no official reaction from Raj Bhawan till Tuesday evening. HT tried to contact Nandini Chakravorty, principal secretary to the governor and Debasis Ghosh, the special secretary, but Raj Bhawan staff members said both were busy in meetings.
This latest praise is a continuation of an amicable relationship between Bose and Banerjee, a completely different dynamic to the hostile relationship between the Chief Minister and the previous governor and now Vice President of India, Jagdeep Dhankar.
In December, Banerjee had said that Bose was a “nice gentleman” and was “cooperating with the state government.”
Trinamool Congress (TMC) Rajya Sabha member Santanu Sen alleged the BJP has become desperate because it could not tolerate the sight of a governor and the chief minster working together for the betterment of Bengal.
He said, “During the tenure of former governor Jagdeep Dhankhar, the BJP used Raj Bhawan as its party office. But the present governor does not work according to the whims of the BJP.”
Criticism of literary awards conferred on Banerjee are, however, not new in West Bengal. There was similar criticism when Calcutta University honoured her with a D.Litt. in 2018. In May 2022, writer and researcher Ratna Rashid Bandopadhyay returned an award to the Paschimbanga Bangla Academy protesting against the institution’s decision to honour Banerjee with a new award on the occasion of the 161st birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore.
