Assam: Anger against removal of Ratan Kachari’s name from Dhekiajuli road

OUR CORRESPONDENT

KOKRAJHAR: A move to remove the name of freedom fighter Ratan Kachari from a road in Dhekiajuli town and rename it after Shyama Prasad Mukherjee has drawn outrage among the intellectual circles of the Bodos. The Bodos said that the move was an insult to the martyr of the 1942 Quit India Movement, Ratan Kachari.

Basumatary said that the Chairman of the Dhekiajuli Municipal Board and Minister Ashok Singhal deserved appropriate legal action against them for removing the name of freedom fighter Ratan Kachari from the road. Strongly reacting to the renaming, retired IRS Officer Janaklal Basumatary said, "Enough is enough! The Bodo tribal people are at the receiving end of countless lashes of abuse, insult, disrespect, ill will, hatred, feeling of enmity, discrimination, suppression, oppression, and dispossession of constitutionally safeguarded rights by the upper-class dominant government, administrative functionaries, organisations, individual intellectuals, and politicians in Assam. It is time to resist and denounce such draconian behaviour of the majority-dominant society."

He said that appropriate legal action must be taken against Abhijit Sarma, President of the APW, for his 'hate speech' where he had asked the government to wash the Assembly House and its chair with holy water to 'purify' it from the 'sinful' touches by a Bodo Speaker in the last term.

Basumatary also alleged that the present Assembly Speaker, Ranjeet Kumar Dass, had conspired to remove the Bodo language from the Assembly office logo. He urged all sections of Bodos to unite and raise their voices unitedly against such acts. He said that Bodo Minister Biswajit Daimary had chosen to remain silent despite the repeated insults but that the community could not do so.

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