Voices from the south and west of India have risen in condemnation of the Delhi police’s description of Bengali, the language of more than 10 crore people living in India, as “Bangladeshi national language”.

The outrageous label on the Bengali language has added another weapon to the armoury of the opposition INDIA bloc where each of the allies is in for their own political battles.

Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin, who had flagged the issue of delimitation some months ago against the Narendra Modi government, called the Delhi police’s terminology a “direct insult to the very language in which our national anthem was written”.

“Such statements are not inadvertent errors or slips. They expose the dark mindset of a regime that consistently undermines diversity and weaponises identity,” Stalin wrote in a long post on X (formerly Twitter).

“In the face of this assault on non-Hindi languages, Mamata Didi stands as a shield for the language and people of West Bengal. She will not let this attack pass without a fitting response.”

The southern states of India and especially Tamil Nadu have been fighting a long battle against the imposition of Hindi, more so in recent times with the changes proposed by the Centre in the language policy for schools.

In Maharashtra, the BJP government’s decision to implement the same brought the Thackeray cousins Uddhav and Raj together.

“The arrogance of the BJP binds them to thedehumanisation of the Bengali people of West Bengal and Northeast India. Today the BJP IT cell insults the Bengali language spoken by lakhs of people in Tripura, Meghalaya and the Barak Valley of Assam,” wrote the Congress deputy leader in the Lok Sabha Gaurav Gogoi. “First the BJP asks the Bengali people to declare themselves Bangladeshis first through CAA, and now the party insults their language as being foreign. The BJP do not want a united India. They are only interested in re-opening old scars.”

D. Raja, general secretary of the CPI, said the Delhi police had exposed the BJP’s vile campaign against Bengali-speaking people.

“Under Amit Shah’s watch, the Delhi police have officially called Bangla a ‘Bangladeshi language.’ This is not a slip. It’s a deliberate hate part of the BJP’s vile campaign against Bengalis in several BJP-ruled states,” Raja said.

“Bengali is an Indian language, a national language like all our languages and the language of Jana Gana Mana, our national anthem.”

He said the Delhi police should apologise to the Bengali people.

“They should feel ashamed for insulting Bengali people and a language that has shaped India’s history. They must be reminded of their constitutional duty before they tear our nation apart. Delhi police must apologise for this grave response,” Raja said.

MK Stalin and D Raja (PTI photos)

Political analyst Raju Parulekar said even Google knows about Bengali being the second most spoken language in India.

“More than 10 crore Indians speak Bengali. Even Google knows that. To call it a “Bangladeshi language” and “Bangladeshi National language’ is certainly an insult to the Bengali Asmita,” Parulekar wrote on his X handle. “Amit Shah led ministry of Home affairs which controls Delhi Police owe an apology to more than 10 crore Indians who speak Bengali.”

Taking a dig at the Delhi cops, academic Apoorvanand said they have invented a new language. “Is this the new educational level of our IPS officers? Or it does not really matter.”

A video from 1942 in which the Jana Gana Mana was played by Hamburg’s Radio Symphony Orchestra as the anthem of Free India Centre founded by Subhas Chandra Bose shared by researcher Anuj Dhar also surfaced in the raging controversy.

Along with the Trinamool, the Congress and Left parties with the understandable exception of the BJP in Bengal have been vocal on the assault on the Bengali-speaking people and now their language.

In his post, the RJD Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha wrote: “WE express ‘sincerest gratitude’ for enlightening/educating us about the existence of such a ‘language’. On a serious note… please stop being the willing-partner in the ‘dog-whistle’ politics of the regime.”

The BJP’s IT cell chief. Amit Malviya, attempted a justification of the Delhi police’s action.

“Delhi Police is absolutely right in referring to the language as Bangladeshi in the context of identifying infiltrators. The term is being used to describe a set of dialects, syntax, and speech patterns that are distinctly different from the Bangla spoken in India. The official language of Bangladesh is not only phonologically different, but also includes dialects like Sylheti that are nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis,” Malviya wrote on his X handle.

“There is in fact no language called Bengali that neatly covers all these variants. “Bengali” denotes ethnicity, not linguistic uniformity. So when the Delhi Police uses “Bangladeshi language,” it is a shorthand for the linguistic markers used to profile illegal immigrants from Bangladesh – not a commentary on Bengali as spoken in West Bengal,” he said.

Trinamool’s Rajya Sabha MP Sushmita Dev reminded Malviya that Sylheti was spoken by people living in three districts in Assam’s Barak valley: “People with zero idea of what languages are spoken in India choose to comment. Lakhs of people who are legitimate citizens for generations and live in the three districts of Barak valley Assam speak Sylheti. It’s our mother tongue. We have lived in this region since 1874 as part of Assam and before that Bengal.”