West Bengalistan

The State Is Seeing an Alarming Demographic Shift and Intense and Openly Flaunted Radicalisation of Muslims. All Thanks to Mamata Banerjee’s Vote Bank Politics.

- Jaideep Mazumdar

SALAFIST MULLAHS ISSUE fatwas against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders. A prominent cleric opines that all women, irrespective of their religion, should cover themselves. Schoolchildren are taught to hail their parents as “abbu” and “ammi”, while school textbooks are revised to delete all non-Islamic terms. The killing of Osama bin Laden is publicly mourned and a price is put on the head of writer Taslima Nasreen and others who are pronounced by regressive clerics to be anti-Islam.

Bigoted mullahs publicly call for the assassination of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed for her crackdown on Islamists in her country. Authorities deny permission to Hindus to celebrate their religious festivals due to objections from Muslims. Houses and shops of Hindus are looted and torched, but the perpetrators are never booked.

One would have expected this from some medieaval corner of Pakistan that’s under the reign of the Taliban or the Daesh. But no, this is West Bengal under the chief ministership of Mamata Banerjee who often dons the hijab and bends over backwards to please venom-spewing Salafimullahs (See box “What is Salafism” in accompanying story “A Dangerous Man”). In the six years she has been in power in Bengal, the state has come under the firm grip of Islamists who have started dictating the agenda in many fields. Thus, the word “ramdhanu” (rainbow) gets changed to “rongdhanu” in school textbooks since the original name (of the rainbow) starts with “Ram”. Schoolchildren are taught to call their paternal uncles “chacha”, not the Bengali “kaku”, and their paternal aunts “fufi-amma” instead of the Bengali “