New Delhi: Meghalaya governor Tathagata Roy has created yet another controversy by commenting that Bengal’s greatness was gone and ‘Bengali boys are mopping floors from Haryana to Kerala’ and ‘Bengali girls are bar dancers in Mumbai’.
Roy wrote the tweets while commenting on the controversy over a new draft education policy that had suggested a three-language plan in which Hindi would be taught in schools in non-Hindi speaking states too.
Roy, a former BJP leader from West Bengal had said that there is no great opposition to Hindi. "There is no great opposition. They are only making empty noise for political reasons. Assam, Odisha and Maharashtra are also non-Hindi speaking states, but they don't oppose Hindi," Roy tweeted in Bangla on Tuesday.
“Who will explain to them that the era of these stalwarts is long gone, and the greatness of Bengal is gone too. Now from Haryana to Kerala, Bengali boys are sweeping floors and Bengali girls are bar dancers in Mumbai, which was unthinkable before,” he added.
While some of Roy's Twitter followers supported his views, some criticised him for making generalised statements about all Bengalis, arguing that youth from many other states also did similar jobs, not because they didn't know Hindi, but due to the lack of opportunities.
Roy later tried to defend his comments by saying that his comments were taken out of context and blamed the media for giving it a ‘bizarre turn’.