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Kolkata: The honeymoon period for the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in West Bengal is not over. Even so, different sections of the populace – the well to do, the poor and the middle classes on the one hand, and the less educated, the intelligentsia, civil servants, even small and medium business owners, evicted hawkers, delisted voters excluded from state government direct cash benefits on the other – all of these categories and classes are lost and confused about where the Suvendu Adhikari team is headed and more importantly how will it get where it needs to go.

Can the BJP’s promise to restore glory and usher in “Sonar Bangla” be separated from the person who coined the phrase? In three weeks time, Bengalis will hold their bi-annual communion with Rabindranath Tagore, on his death anniversary on Baishe Sraban. It has been the practice of the West Bengal government to arrange a 15-day event around this date, reconnecting people to the “the Great Sentinel” or Gurudev, a title bestowed on him by Mahatma Gandhi, through daily performances of his music, theatre and poetry.

Is the new regime going to ignore Bengal’s tryst with Tagore?

This year, the BJP government has not, as yet, got around to even discussing with the Department of Information and Culture what is to be done. Does it indicate that the new regime is going to ignore Bengal’s tryst with Tagore, or, does it suggest that the department of culture will not be organising the usual programming on and beyond Baishe Sraban?

Having initiated the ugly debate between Vande Mataram and Jana Gana Mana, having ceded primacy to the singing of the National Song and made it mandatory at all government functions, is West Bengal going to break off its decades long relationship with the commemoration of Tagore’s death anniversary.  “Nobody knows,” is the response of a retired bureaucrat, who had in his heydays been associated with planning and delivering programming on the all-important occasion.

Can the renaming of Lakshmir Bhandar (the unending coffers of the Goddess of Bounty) to Annapurna Yojana (the Goddess who feeds everyone) with double the direct cash transfer compensate for the exclusion of two categories of women – those who do not merit the benefit and those who were deleted from the voters list by the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls? In the second category of the excluded – women who have applied to the Tribunals for inclusion of their names and who have received domicile certificates after applying for citizenship – when will they find closure? The question that is haunting lakhs of women is........

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