A political slugfest broke out between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress on Monday after the latter accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of insulting Bankim Chandra Chatterjee by calling him 'Bankim da', prompting a counter-attack from the saffron party, which accused West Bengal's ruling party of defiling the state's cultural legacy for a decade.
The flashpoint was PM's reference to the author of Vande Mataram during a Lok Sabha discussion marking 150 years of the national song.
TMC member Saugata Roy objected to the use of the suffix 'da' and urged the PM to say 'Bankim Babu' instead.
Modi immediately accepted the sentiment, saying, "I will say Bankim Babu. Thank you, I respect your sentiments," and asked in a lighter vein whether he could still address Roy as 'dada'.
Soon after, the TMC launched a sharp attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party on X, saying for years Bengal had watched the BJP 'speak in two tongues, pretending to respect Bengal while repeatedly spitting on the legacy of our greatest minds'.
The party said, 'The same people who demolished Vidyasagar's statue in the heart of Kolkata now dare to stand in Parliament and trivialise Rishi Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay as 'Bankim da'. This is not ignorance, this is a calculated attempt to belittle Bengal, to mock our intellectual heritage, to reduce our icons to punchlines in their political theatre.'
'But Bengal sees through every act of BJP's politics. And Bengal will answer,' the party added.
In another strongly worded post, the ruling party described the BJP as 'BOHIRAGOTO interlopers' who were trying to dishonestly appropriate Bengal's cultural icons to mask their 'utter political bankruptcy' in the state.
Accusing the BJP of being 'grotesquely alien' to Bengal's cultural consciousness, the party alleged that it had repeatedly betrayed ignorance while invoking Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and said the latest controversy followed the backlash over the alleged attempt to ban Vande Mataram in the Rajya Sabha.
In a stinging swipe at the PM, the TMC said that referring to Chattopadhyay as 'Bankim da' was a 'clumsy, performative display of cultural cosplay' and that 'Bengal does not casually slap the suffix 'da' onto figures it venerates'.
'Only a cultural illiterate would think that sounds respectful,' the party said, asserting that Bankim Chandra belonged to Bengal's 'moral and intellectual spine, not to the BJP's damage-control toolkit'.
The TMC concluded its post by branding the BJP as 'impostors' and 'appropriators who cannot even fake sincerity properly'.
Reacting sharply, senior BJP leader and Bengal co-incharge Amit Malviya accused the TMC of indulging in 'performative cultural outrage' to deflect attention from what he called 'a decade of systemic defilement of Bengal's heritage under TMC rule'.
'Your performative cultural outrage is a pathetic attempt to deflect from a decade of systemic defilement of Bengal's heritage under TMC rule. Let's deal in hard facts,' Malviya wrote.
'The real insult to Rishi Bankim Chandra isn't an affectionate suffix; it is the TMC ecosystem's relentless ideological war against Vande Mataram, the very soul of his legacy, sacrificed at the altar of your appeasement politics.'
He accused the TMC of illegally encroaching on Rabindranath Tagore's ancestral home at Jorasanko for party offices, claiming that Mamata Banerjee's silence amounted to consent and that it took a high court order to evict the party.
The BJP leader also accused the chief minister of habitual public ignorance about Bengal's icons and described her attempts to rival Tagore through projects like Biswa Bangla University near Santiniketan and her literary work Kathanjali as 'grotesque narcissism'.
Asserting that the BJP was 'a party of Bengal', Malviya cited Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee as a true son of Bengal's soil and said over 2.3 crore Bengalis had voted for the BJP in the 2024 elections.
"Are they aliens too?" he asked, adding that 'the real impostors are those who quote Tagore on stage while running a regime defined by recruitment scams, cut-money and communal appeasement'.
The controversy unfolded even as Modi, during the discussion, highlighted how Vande Mataram had inspired the nation, energised the freedom struggle and symbolised national resolve, a sentiment Mahatma Gandhi had once likened to the national anthem.
The latest exchange adds to the sharpening cultural and political confrontation between the TMC and the BJP in West Bengal as both sides seek to stake claim over Bengal's historical icons and ideological space ahead of the 2026 assembly elections.
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