Bangla switch to take WB up the pecking order

KOLKATA: The West Bengal assembly on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution, recommending that the state be renamed Bangla, following up on a two-year-old effort to move the state up the alphabetical order of India’s states. The state government will now forward the proposal to the Centre, which notifies new names of places including states.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee told the assembly that the Centre had recently informed the state that it can accept only one name. The Centre’s response came after the state government wrote to it in August 2016 suggesting three names: Bangla (in Bengali), Bengal (English) and Bangal (Hindi). The assembly chose Bangla.

“Although we sent the proposal a long ago, the Union government decided to sit on it. They recently sent a communication, advising us to choose one name instead of three. We do not want any controversy on this issue. We have decided to choose Bangla. Let the resolution be passed unanimously,” Banerjee told the assembly.

The state government first proposed the renaming in 2016. West Bengal parliamentary affairs minister Partha Chatterjee had then argued for the change saying bureaucrats and politicians from the state often complain that they are asked to speak at the end of every national-level meeting in Delhi.

This was because the speakers’ lists at such meeting are prepared according to alphabetical order of the states they represent.

“If West Bengal gets the new name, it will leapfrog from bottom of the list to the top of the pecking order,” he had said in August 2016 when the Assembly cleared the three names.

The renaming will help the state appear at the fourth spot after Arunachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Assam in the alphabetic order of the states.

STATE GOVT WILL NOW FORWARD PROPOSAL TO CENTRE, WHICH NOTIFIES NEW NAMES