BJP President Amit Shah, while speaking at an election rally in West Bengal on Tuesday 7 May, alleged that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is not allowing people to chant “Jai Shri Ram” in the state.
“Lord Ram is a part of the culture of India... Can anybody stop people from taking his name? I want to ask Mamata didi, if Shri Ram’s name is not taken in India, will it be chanted in Pakistan?”Amit Shah, BJP president
Shah’s allegation came shortly after a video on social media showed Mamata Banerjee get off her vehicle and reprimand people who chanted ‘Jai Shri Ram’ as her convoy passed them. While those who raised the chant are not visible in the video, the chief minister can be heard calling out to them and asking “why are you running away ?”
Soon after the video started circulating, journalist Seema Goswami weighed in about the politicisation of Jai Shri Ram. “I don’t know anyone who grew up using Jai Shri Ram” as a greeting,”she tweeted.
“It was always “Ram Ram” or “Jai Ram Ji Ki”. That’s what I always heard (and used) growing up. The use of “Jai Shri Ram” started as a political slogan during the Ayodhya movement. And it remains a political slogan,” Goswami said.
Journalist Namita Bhandare, responding to Goswami’s tweet, said that the word “Sia” in the more commonly used “Jai Sia Ram” had been replaced by “Shri” over the past few decades.
When Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta Tweeted claiming that ‘Jai Shri Ram is becoming “the slogan of defiance and change in large parts of West Bengal”, another Twitter user replied saying that the chant has been weaponised as a war cry to incite violence against Muslims.
“Terrorists successfully used that slogan to drum up support for bringing down a 500 year old mosque & creating riots in the aftermath,” he tweeted.
Writer Pritish Nandy tweeted that he had never heard a Bengali chant Jai Shri Ram. “We chant political slogans, Tagore poems, slogans of protest against wrongdoing anywhere in the world. Tomar naam, amar naam, Vietnam,” he claimed.
Bengali columnist Garga Chatterjee also joined the debate stating that “Bengal is Durga Saraswati Kali land, not Gutkhaland imported riot slogan land ; that Bengal is Rabindranath land, not Dhokla land; that Bengal is a civilized land.”
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