Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Sudip Bandyopadhyay said on July 25 that the people of West Bengal will never support the demand of incorporating northern parts of the state into the North East.
The TMC leader was referring to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Union Minister Sukanta Majumdar urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to incorporate northern parts of the West Bengal state into the North East because the two regions have ‘many similarities.’
“Bengal will never be divided. Sukanta Majumdar has raised the demand for North Bengal, but he needs to remember that the people of Bengal will never support such demands. If he keeps talking like this, just like CPI(M) and Congress were reduced to zero, BJP will also be reduced to zero in 2026,” Bandyopadhyay told news agency ANI.
Majumdar, the BJP chief of West Bengal, said in a video on July 24 that he had met with the prime minister and handed over a presentation highlighting the similarities between North Bengal and North East states.
“I requested him to incorporate north Bengal, a part of West Bengal, into the North East [region],” Mazumdar is heard as saying in the video.
Majumdar is a Lok Sabha MP from Balurghat seat in northern West Bengal. In the video, he said the prime minister would decide on the proposal. “If North Bengal is incorporated into the North East, it will benefit from the Union government schemes,” he said.
The BJP has a significant presence in northern West Bengal. In the 2024 general election, it won five out of the seven Lok Sabha seats in the region. Earlier too, some groups have long demanded statehood for northern areas of West Bengal. In 2021, John Barla, the then BJP MP from northern Bengal’s Alipurduar constituency had also sought statehood for the region.
