Bengali Jingoism

Filled with vicarious pride over the Nobel Prize in economics being awarded to Abhijit Banerjee—alongside fellow economist and his wife, Esther Duflo, and Harvard professor Michael Kremer—for their pioneering work in furthering our understanding of poverty, Bengalis took to Twitter with a vengeance. It didn’t matter if they had not read Banerjee’s work, they boasted as if the award was confirmation of inherent Bengali superiority, thus reinforcing their own views of themselves as superior to their compatriots from the rest of the country. Refusing to be cowed by Bengali bumptiousness though, many other Indians joined in the celebrations. But when former Congress president Rahul Gandhi outed Banerjee on Twitter as an architect of NYAY, the party’s universal basic income programme, social media splintered along familiar ideological lines. The governor of Meghalaya, Tathagata Roy, unafraid of airing even his most unsavoury views on Twitter, spoke for many right-wing Indians when he expressed glee, “as a Kolkatan”, before admitting he “had never heard of Abhijeet Banerjee”. It was, Roy wrote, “merely his Indian blood that gave me a feeling of pride... After all, even Zionist Jews are proud of Karl Marx!” What was it Mark Twain (or Abraham Lincoln or Confucius) supposedly said? Something about it being better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to tweet and remove all doubt? ■