As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is celebrating their icon Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s 125th birth anniversary in West Bengal, actor-politician Papia Adhikary claimed that the Bengali ideologue had saved all natives of the state from speaking in Urdu.
“Modi has told us ‘Bhoy out, Borsha in‘ (fear out, trust in). He (Syama Prasad Mookerjee) was the son of Bengal’s icon Ashutosh Mukherjee. He had saved us from speaking Urdu, from getting amalgamated with Pakistan,” the BJP MLA from Tollyganj said, speaking to The Statesman.
Elaborating further on the contribution of Mookerjee towards Bengal, Adhikary claimed, “It has his doing that West Bengal did not get pushed towards Pakistan. He had integrated us with India.”
The actor-politician claimed that her party pay their respects to Mookerjee every year on his birth anniversary but it was “not so visible to everyone earlier”.
শ্যামাপ্রসাদ মুখোপাধ্যায়ের জন্মজয়ন্তী নিয়ে প্রতিক্রিয়া পাপিয়া অধিকারীর#PapiyaAdhikary #SyamaPrasadMookerjee #WestBengalPolitics pic.twitter.com/kq5U5n3vm3
— Dainik Statesman (@StatesmanDainik) July 6, 2026
Adhikari highlighted that her party is celebrating the Bengali ideologue’s birthday on a grand scale since it is his 125th birth anniversary.
Suggesting that Bengalis would have been forced to convert into Islam if Mookerjee had not intervened and rejected the united Bengal proposal, which had suggested a combined sovereign territory with West Bengal and east Pakistan (now Bangladesh) together, Adhikari said, “He (Mookerjee) had pushed Bengalis to speak in their mother tongue. Otherwise, we would have been forced to speak in Urdu. We would have been forced to cover ourseves from our heads.”
The BJP leader further said that owing to Mookerjee’s contribution, people from West Bengal are able to live proudly like Bengalis.
“Syama Prasad Mookerjee will stay immortal. We are now naturally Bengalis, we are speaking in Bengali and we feel pride to be residents of West Bengal,” she said.
The BJP is celebrating the birth anniversary of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh founder, the party considered to be the ideological predecessor of the BJP which is currently in power at the Centre as well as West Bengal.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah will lay the foundation stone for a 125-foot statue of Syama Prasad at Eco Park in Kolkata during his visit to the city on the occasion.