The Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Sunday launched a scathing attack on Delhi Police over a purported official letter that described Bengali as the “Bangladeshi national language”, calling it a deliberate and unconstitutional slur against a constitutionally recognised Indian language.

Sharing a copy of the letter on social media, West Bengal chief minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee accused the Centre of insulting Bengali-speaking Indians and attempting to strip the language of its Indian identity. “Scandalous, insulting, anti-national, unconstitutional!” she posted, demanding widespread protests.

The letter, reportedly written by a Delhi Police officer to the in-charge of Banga Bhawan, West Bengal’s state guest house in New Delhi, sought a translator “proficient in Bangladeshi national language” to assist in a case involving eight suspected illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

The authenticity of the letter has not been independently verified by The Telegraph Online.

Calling it a “calculated insult”, the TMC said this was no clerical error but a deliberate move to delegitimise Bengali.

“Is there no limit to BJP’s hatred for Bengalis?” the party posted on X. “Bangla is spoken by 25 crore people globally and is one of India’s 22 official languages.”

TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee also demanded the immediate suspension of the investigating officer and a formal apology from the Delhi Police, the BJP and the Union home minister.

“To call Bangla a foreign language is not just an insult — it’s an attack on our identity,” he said.

He accused the BJP of using this incident to defame Bengal and equate it with Bangladesh as part of a “narrow political propaganda”, violating the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.

TMC also claimed that Bengali-speaking workers across BJP-ruled states were being harassed and detained under the guise of checking illegal immigrants. “We will not allow our identity to be trampled,” said Mamata Banerjee.

Defending the Delhi Police’s terminology, BJP West Bengal president Samik Bhattacharya said the documents recovered in the case were written in the dialect of Bengali spoken in Bangladesh. “The police have rightly referred to it as Bangladeshi language,” he said.

Bhattacharya further claimed that illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Rohingyas were depriving Indian citizens from West Bengal of jobs in other states and accused TMC of shielding such elements for vote bank politics.