West Bengal to have six more languages for official use

Given her quirkiness and 'shoot first, ask later' style of decisionmaking, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was expected to drop a clanger sooner or later.

In the end, she managed to do it with her very first set of official decisions as chief minister.

Bengal will now have as many as six "second official" languages, she announced on Thursday.

English and Bengali are the two official (presumably, first official) languages of the state. To these will be added Urdu, Gurmukhi, Nepali, Ol-Chiki, Oriya and Hindi. Clearly, she wanted to ensure that no minority, no matter how small, felt left out.

Bureaucrats say the latest decree would make government offices a virtual tower of Babel. "The announcements would lead to more confusion as bureaucrats may be forced to learn Nepali, Gurmukhi, or Ol- chiki," said one.

But learning some of these 'languages' might pose some problems. Gurmukhi is actually a script, not a language, a devnagari derivative used to write Punjabi.

The people of Nepali descent in West Bengal's hill districts speak Gorkhali, not Nepali.

And Ol-Chiki, the language of the Santhal tribes, has a script which was only invented in 1925 by Pandit Raghuram Murmu, and is not taught in any school! Even Urdu, which superficially might be assumed to be spoken by the state's large Muslim population, is spoken by less than 5 per cent of the state's 2.3 crore Muslims.

In fact, all the languages singled out by Mamata are actually spoken by a minority.

Of the state's 9 crore population, Santhals ( Ol- Chiki) accounted for 22.8 lakh, Nepali for 8 lakh, Punjabi 4 lakh and Oriya just around 1 lakh.

On the ground, observers say, this announcement will change little in the way the government machinery functions.

After all, English has been the official language for all forms of official communication since the Raj era, and in the state's lower levels of administration, Bengali is generally used for communication.

But others said the flood of official languages was a calculated ploy, used to cloak Mamata's real agenda - appeasing the Muslim vote bank.

On Thursday, she made a series of announcements aimed at Muslims.

The CM announced that the state government had decided to set up a Nazrul Islam Academy in the state to undertake extensive research on the works of the immortal Bengali poet.

"It is unfortunate that not much research has been done on the works of Nazrul Islam," Mamata

said, adding that the state government would allocate space and fund for setting up of the academy.

Didi announced on Thursday that the government had decided to rename the Aliah University in Kolkata as Aliah Madrassa University by bringing in an amendment in the state assembly.

She also said the government would erect boundary walls around all Muslim burial grounds in the state. And just in case anybody had missed the point she was trying to make, Mamata also announced that she has requested former chief justice of Delhi High Court, Justice Rajinder Sachar to visit West Bengal to advise the new government on protecting the rights of the minorities.

During her election campaign, Mamata had promised to create one million government jobs within one year. By keeping the madrassas in the cocooned system, Mamata Banerjee would

rather keep the students away from getting government jobs, critics said.

Predictably, the ousted Communist Party of India (Marxist) is seeing red. "Let the people of West Bengal say how they will gain from renaming of the university," thundered Muhammad Salim, CPM's central committee member.

Salim said rather than renaming the Aliah University, the new government could have worked on bringing in all the madrassas of the state under the modern system of education.

He claimed that the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee- led government had been trying to bring the madrassas under modern education.

"We had also started madrassas for women students," he said.

But Didi is clearly not paying any attention to the CPM - or even learning from its mistakes.

The Left Front had kept English and computers out of the school curriculum in West Bengal for a long time. It eventually admitted that the decision was a blunder and had forced the state's youth to lag behind youth from other states in the job market.

There is also the small question of paying for all this largesse.

The state is currently passing through an acute financial crisis.

It has a huge fiscal deficit of ` 2.5 lakh crore, and was forced to use up more than half the year's quota of market borrowing within the first month of the current financial year, before Mamata took office.

Mamata also has her task cut out to try and keep her other poll promises. The big challenge would be to re- establish West Bengal as an abode of peace. Quite apart from the Maoists, she will have a tough time restraining her own supporters, who were brutally suppressed during the 34 years of Left Front rule in the state. Since the announcement of election results, 12 persons have been killed in clashes between the CPM cadres and her Trinamool Congress members.

The new chief minister will also have to keep her promise of solving the problems in Darjeeling hills within three months. The Gorkha Janamukti Morcha ( GJM) is committed to a separate Gorkhaland. New Delhi is not keen on further re- organisation of states.

Moreover, to woo support in Jangalmahal, the Maoist heartland in Bankura, Purulia and West Midnapore districts, Mamata had promised to withdraw Operation Green- hunt and grant amnesty to all political prisoners ( including arrested Maoist cadres). Whether she can bend New Delhi's plan to tackle the Maoists to her purpose remains to be seen.

To appease the adivasis in Jangalmahal, she has announced that there would be a special economic package for the area. But, money for the special economic package could be a problem.

But that has hardly deterred Mamata. With a magnificent disregard for detail, she has already announced her next dream project - of beautifying Kolkata, and fulfil her dream of transforming the 300 year- old city to look like London!