Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury on Sunday wrote to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, pleading to lodge a protest from the state for not accomodating Bengali language in the list of classical languages of New Education Policy (NEP).
In the letter addressed to Mamata, Chowdhury said, "I do like to plead you that as the Chief Minister of West Bengal, it is incumbent upon you to promote the Bengali language at the national level as already 'BENGALI' has secured the second most spoken language in India after 'HINDI. In the NEP, Bengali has not been incorporated in the list of classical languages in India much to the injustice upon us."
"I know you are a great connoisseur of Bengali language, even authored many books on Bengali will certainly take it a serious exception and will be stubbornly lodging your protest to Human Resource Development Ministry. Bengali is an old language and has been existing for more than thousand years. Bengal is also known as the breeding ground of Indian renaissance," the letter read.
The Congress leader further urged Banerjee to mobilise all the academics, educationists of Bengal apart from all political parties to raise a unmous voice for enlisting Bengali as a classical language.
Earlier on Friday, Chowdhury wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting him to make Bengali a classical language in the government's NEP.
Wanting to know why Bengali was not considered as a classical language, he had said, "I wish to draw your attention to the following. Today is the 79th death anniversary of Kobiguru Rabindra Nath Tagore, who was the first non- European poet to receive the Nobel prize, in 1913. It is my simple question -- why the Bengali language has not been recognised as a classical language in the NEP."
"What are the attributes needed for enlisting a language in the pantheon of classical languages? While Bengali is the fifth most spoken language in the world, it also has an original literary tradition. Anthropological and archaeological evidence suggests that Bengali speaking people are a conglomerate of several racial elements welded together by the Bengali language," he had added.
( With inputs from ANI )