West Bengal should become Banga: State to ask Centre

The state government will soon write to the Centre requesting them to take measures to change the name. The decision was taken after  Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was kept waiting for nearly six hours before she was allowed to talk in the Interstate Security Council meeting in Delhi at Rashtrapati Bhavan on July 16. Banerjee was given only 12 minutes which was not enough to articulate the various problems of the state.

According to a senior official of the state government, Chief Minister Banerjee had decided to raise some important issues in the meeting. She also waited many hours for her turn but she was allowed to speak at the end of the meet. As a result she failed to touch upon some points which required a discussion in the meeting. After Banerjee was not given enough time during her speech, she expressed dissatisfaction.

The whole thing happened because West Bengal comes last in alphabetical order and hence Banerjee was the last Chief Minister to speak on the occasion. All the Chief Ministers of the states who were present at the programme were allowed to speak on the basis of their state’s alphabetical order. But this cannot justify that the last speaker would not even be given the opportunity to take up the state’s pressing issues.

Following the incident the state government has decided to write to the Centre urging that West Bengal be renamed  Banga. It may be mentioned that after coming to power for the first time in 2011, the Mamata Banerjee government called an all party meeting in August where she put forth a proposal to change the name of the state to Banga. Later, the state government had sent the proposal to the Centre for its consideration.Previously the name of the city was changed to Calcutta to Kolkata.

In 2014, the then joint secretary of the Centre-state relation said that the final decision will be taken after amendment of the constitution for which a bill West Bengal Alteration of name Act 2014 would be placed in Parliament. But two years on, the Bill is yet to be taken up.