West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee declared February 14 as a state holiday in a notification in December. Officially, the state government plans to celebrate the day--now observed as Valentine’s Day, a commercial celebration of love across the world—as the birth anniversary of noted social reformer Panchanan Barma (1866-1935). But his birthday falls on February 13 but here again, Mamata has been clever—she’s using Barma's birthday as per the Bengali calendar, poila phagun (the first day of Spring), so as not to give an official reason set off the BJP and the right-wing trolls. The Bengali date follows the lunar calendar and depends on the lunar cycle, so the birth date sometimes falls on February 13 and sometimes on the 14th.
Through this move, the chief minister hopes to kill two birds with one stone. The Trinamool’s student wing, TMC Chatra Parishad, had approached the party leadership in December 2020 asking it to help students celebrate Valentine's Day by declaring it a holiday. And the nod to Barma is sure to improve the TMC’s standing with the Rajbangshi community, the indigenous tribes of Cooch Behar district and parts of Assam, where he is revered. About 10 per cent of West Bengal’s 100 million population speak Rajbangshi and they are spread over five districts of north Bengal. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the Rajbangshis played a major role in giving BJP the upper hand in seven Lok Sabha constituencies. So there was a certain desperation in the TMC to win them back.
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