Bengal sees language battle ahead of 2019 polls

KOLKATA: With barely five months to go for general elections, the political battle for West Bengal’s 42 seats is now also being fought on the language front. While chief minister Mamata Banerjee is using Hindi to woo non-Bengali voters – at least 14% of the electorate -- the state unit of the BJP is using the Hindi party tag she gave it to hit back at her.

Banerjee is learnt to have instructed her party’s digital wing to create more social networking platforms for non-Bengali voters, and the Trinamool Congress is bringing up several new units for the ‘Hindi Bhashi Samaj’.

The Bengal CM has formed a special unit in her party to focus on the Hindi-speaking people in Bengal, and has been addressing rallies in Hindi in districts recently, calling herself a “sachha Hindustani”.


Trinamool’s digital wing has started several services in Hindi. It has set up its units in Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam and Tripura to spread the network and reach out to prospective voters. A senior leader of the Trinamool Congress said that Bengal has at least 13 parliamentary constituencies where Hindi-speaking voters can become the deciding factor. According to census 2011, Bengal has at least 64 lakh Hindi-speaking voters while the total count of non-Bengali voters is more than 1.5 crore.

BJP, on its part, is trying hard to shrug off the tag of a party that’s primarily from the Hindi heartland. The party, in its effort to woo the Bengalis, has sidelined at least six senior non-Bengali leaders who earlier seemed to be important functionaries in the political structure.