The West Bengal Assembly on Thursday passed a resolution renaming the state as “Bangla”.
The resolution was moved by the Trinamool Congress and supported by the Left parties and the Congress.
Now the proposal will go to the Centre and only a go-ahead from the Ministry of Home Affairs will make the new name official. The name (Bangla) will be same for all languages unlike the previous proposal when it was suggested that the state will be called Bengal in English, Bangla in Bengali and Bengal in Hindi. That time, the proposal was turned down by the Centre.
Before that, the Mamata government had proposed to rechristening the state as ‘Paschim Bango’ in 2011, but it failed to get the Centre’s approval.
CM Mamata Banerjee has been angling for a new name for her state for some time now. One of her reasons is that West Bengal comes last in state lists, which means the CM gets to speak last in meetings, or often not at all due to the paucity of time.
Independence and the Partition in 1947 led to the division of the province of Bengal into two parts West Bengal and East Bengal. West Bengal stayed in India, and East Bengal is now part of Bangladesh.