By our Staff Reporter
GUWAHATI, Dec 20: Around 14 different Bengali organizations have made an open declaration that they are behind the newly-formed Bharatiya Ga Parisahd (BGP) that held its first political convention at Bhaskar gar near Lalganesh in Guwahati today.
In a resolution taken at the convention, the BGP said: “We, the Bengali Hindus, aren’t going to vote for the BJP for its betrayal to the community on the issue of giving us citizenship. We blame it on Union minister and State BJP president Sarbanda Sonowal for this conspiracy against us.”
Most of the speakers at the convention said that the recent notification issued by the Centre for giving Indian citizenship to Hindu Bengalis was a betrayal by the Saffron party. After the issuance of the notification, many Bengali organizations moved the Centre and met its top leaders, including Home Minister Rajth Singh, to know if the Hindu Bengalis would be given Indian citizenship. “The Government at the Centre was, however, evasive on the issue. They fell short of giving us any assurances on the issue,” they said, and added: “The BJP wants to push the issue after the Assembly polls in Assam slated for 2016. This precisely mean that the Centre is using the issue of citizenship to us only as a lollipop.”
The leaders of the BGP further said: “There’re around 70 lakh Bengalis in Assam, who, if team up as a party, can solve our own problems ourselves. We are majority in as many as 52 constituencies in the State. We’re going to field our own candidates in the Assembly elections next year.”
Meanwhile, the leaders of the 14 organization stood behind the BGP and said that they were going to back the party in the next Assembly elections in the State. They said that using issues like ‘D’ voters and withdrawal of detention camps, the government at the Centre has all along been deceiving them.
The leaders of the party who spoke at the convention were president Sabimul Biswas, working president Antosh Choudhury, vice president Surajit Chakravarty and general secretary Ratneswar Chakravorty. The party has as many as 17 district committees.