TMC lawmakers meet PM on renaming of Bengal

New Delhi: A delegation of Trinamool Congress lawmakers met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament on Wednesday and submitted a memorandum, urging him to take steps to change the name of West Bengal, a demand for which has been pending with the Centre.

The 12-member delegation led by Lok Sabha MP Sudip Bandopadhyay requested the prime minister to bring in a legislation to amend the name of West Bengal to "Bangla".

Earlier during the day, the government had announced that there was no proposal to make amendments in the Constitution to change the name of West Bengal to 'Bangla'.

"To change name of any state, constitutional amendment is required. There is no proposal to amend Constitution as of now," Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai said.

He was replying to a query on why the Centre was rejecting the West Bengal government proposal to change the name of state to 'Bangla'.

Rai mentioned that name 'Bangla' has similarities to 'Bangladesh".

On July 26 last year, the West Bengal Assembly had passed a unanimous resolution to change the name of the state to 'Bangla' in the three most-spoken languages -- Bengali, Hindi and English -- and had sent the proposal to the Home Ministry.

The delegation also submitted all the letters written by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to the Centre over the renaming of the state.

Rajya Sabha member Sukhendu Sekhar Ray raised the renaming issue during the zero hour on Wednesday.

He said that "no geographical territory ever existed officially to be known as East Bengal".

"The word Bangla or the territory called Bangla is believed to have been derived from Banga, a Dravidian tribe that settled in the region 1000 BCE," he added.

The Home Ministry which is the arbitrator in the issue has not taken any step so far in accepting the assembly's demand.

Ray pointed out that after the Partition in 1947, following the award passed by the boundary commission, commonly known as Radcliffe Commission, the eastern districts of Bengal became east Pakistan which later became an independent country of Bangladesh.

The delegation also raised the issue of disinvestment of Public Sector Undertakings or PSUs, especially the Air India with prime minister and requested him to revert back the decision.

Sources, however, said that the prime minister declined their demand in this regard.

Last week, the government reconstituted a group of ministers tasked with working out the modalities for sale of Air India. The GoM, call the Air India Specific Alternative Mechanism, will be headed by home minister Amit Shah and comprised three other ministers. The earlier panel had five members.

The other ministers in the panel will be finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, commerce and railway minister Piyush Goyal and civil aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri.

The other issue raked up during the meeting was corporatization of ordinance factories in the country's defence sector. Trinamool supremo and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee wrote a letter on Tuesday to PM Modi in this regard. She called the move "extremely sensitive and urgent issue". The OFB consists of 41 factories, nine training institutes across the country and about 1.6 lakh officers and employees have often been called the fourth pillar of the Indian Defence apparatus which produces a vast range of arms and equipment for the armed forces, she wrote.

TMC Lok Sabha leader Sudip Bandyopadhyay, Abhishek Banerjee, Kalyan Banerjee, Mahua Moitra, Saugata Roy, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Rajya Sabha leader Derek O'Brien, Sukhen Shekhar Roy, and other senior members were present in the meeting.