Mamata Banerjee ready to rename West Bengal

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is famous for her short temper. Last week, she attended the inter-state council meeting at the President’s House. All chief ministers were invited here to talk about various state related issues. Mamata, who wanted to discuss the alphabetical order of the state had to wait for more than six hours and only had a chance to speak to PM Modi for 12 minutes with PM at the end of the session.

The issue was about the change of the name of West Bengal. Mamata who came to power for the first time in 2011, wanted to do this since a long time. She even called for an all-party meeting where they discussed and decided that West Bengal’s name would be changed to ‘Paschimbanga’. The idea is that this will also help address the ‘alphabetical issue’.

The proposal to change the name was also sent to the Centre after an all-party agreement. After it was proposed, the joint secretary (Centre-State) in ministry of home affairs Suresh Kumar during 2014, reportedly informed the state government regarding a bill. The bill named West Bengal (Alteration of Name) Act, 2014 was supposed to be tabled in parliament so as to let the proposal move forward and make a final decision.

However, the problem was that there has been no progress in the matter even after two years. The bill did not make it to the table in the House. According to sources, Banerjee already instructed her government to prepare themselves to do whatever is required for the proposal to be green lit.

The West Bengal CM went to Delhi all prepared to discuss the various issues related to the name change with the Prime Minister in the meeting. However, the meeting did not go as she planned. She had to wait a long time and even in the end, she was not allowed to speak for too long.

Image Credit: Biswarup Ganguly / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Image Reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amta_Road_-_West_Bengal_State_Highway_15_-_Domjur_-_Howrah_2014-04-14_0548.JPG