Rajnath Singh
"Hey nuton, dekha dik aarbaar, jonmero prothomo shubhokshon" — O new one, show yourself once more, in the auspicious first moment of birth.
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore wrote these words as an invocation — a prayer to the perpetually renewing spirit of Bengal. It is traditionally sung on his birth anniversary, honouring him and the joy of a renewal, an awakening that a birthday signifies. Gurudev understood that this land does not simply change. It is continually reborn.
It is a happy coincidence that less than a week before the 165th birth anniversary of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, West Bengal has witnessed a historic change. On May 4, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured a historic victory in the West Bengal Assembly elections. Yet, for the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this election was never merely a political contest. It was an opportunity to restore the lost glory of this great land, a civilisational calling that transcends electoral considerations.
Today, it is worth pausing, setting aside the noise of political argument to ask a deeper question: what is Bengal, truly? And what does it mean to restore her? To understand Bengal's present, one must first descend into her past — not the past of decades, but of centuries.
Long before Bengal became a byword for intellectual refinement, she was a holy land. In the 15th century, on the banks of the Ganga in Nabadwip, a young man named Nimai — whom the world would come to know as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu — began to sing. His kirtan was not merely music. It was a social reform movement dressed in devotion. He embraced the untouchable, danced with the scholar, and declared that the name of the divine was available to all without the burden of any ascriptive identities. The Vaishnavism he ignited became the spiritual architecture of Bengal and Bharat’s soul: joyous and inclusive.
Two centuries later, that same spirit found its worldly complement in the Baul tradition — wandering mystics who wore no caste, carried no scripture, and sang of "maner manush," the man of the heart. Among them, none shone brighter than Lalan Fakir, a man whom no religion could claim and every tradition embraced. A Hindu or a Muslim? No one could tell, and need not have bothered. This syncretic genius was Bengali, an identity that can only be lived.
In the previous three centuries, Bengal did not merely participate in India's moral awakening — she anchored it. Raja Rammohan Roy looked at a society that had grown rigid and corrupt in its customs and chose neither to abandon tradition nor to surrender to it blindly. He reformed it — fighting for sati abolition and insisting on looking within to resurrect oneself. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar carried that torch further, turning education into an act of liberation, especially for women.
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay gave the nation its first great novel, which included Vande Mataram, the war cry that would echo from the mouths of freedom fighters for a century and continues on every Indian’s lips today. Bengal also gave India its first woman physician, Dr Kadambini Ganguly, who inspired women towards self-reliance and freedom. Dr Syama Prasad Mukherjee, a staunch nationalist, sacrificed his life for the unity of India.
Perhaps among all the extraordinary minds and great souls that Bengal has given birth to, Swami Vivekananda stands as the most radiant, enlightened and electrifying mind. Swami Vivekananda, in his historic speech at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, introduced to the world the greatness of Hinduism and called for religious tolerance and an end to fanaticism. But when he returned home, he told his own people something harder to hear — that spirituality without strength is sentimentality, that a hungry man cannot be taught philosophy, that the goddess must be worshipped not only in the temple but in the woman, in the poor, in the nation itself.
This is what Bengal is. This is what she has always been. And this is how Prime Minister Narendra Modi sees Bengal. Not looking back to become something she was; certainly not becoming any other alien land, but looking forward to reawakening Bengal from its civilisational slumber and achieving her fullest potential.
For too long, some sections of Bengal's intellectual and political class treated their own civilisational inheritance as an embarrassment — something to be transcended, explained away, or replaced with colonial ideologies. The result was decades of arrested development, institutional decay, and the silencing of those who dared to speak of dharma, of culture that did not contradict but completed Bengal's pluralist soul.
The result of the recently concluded assembly elections in West Bengal should not be seen merely as an electoral verdict. It represents a public mandate against those who distanced Bengal from its very roots and values. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the West Bengal Assembly election was never a battle for power. It was a sacred endeavour — a ‘yajna’ to restore the lost glory.
PM Modi’s deep affinity with Belur Math, his reverence for Swami Vivekananda, his framing of good governance as seva — service as a form of worship — these are not political statements. They provide Bengal with the impetus to recover her past glory and move ahead into a glorious and secure future. They are an example of a ‘Pradhan Sevak’ performing his ‘Pradhan Dharma’.
To restore Bengal is to build world-class infrastructure alongside the ghats where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu sang. It is to fund the schools that Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar dreamt of. It is to build universities of eminence in the land which led India in education for centuries. It is to provide dignity to all tribal brothers and sisters of West Bengal. It is to respond to the aspirations of the people of hilly areas, who have long suffered stepmotherly treatment at the hands of the ruling parties of Bengal.
Hey nutan. O new one — reveal yourself once more. This is the prayer with which the first BJP government in Bengal, under the guidance of PM Modi and the blessings of each of Bengal’s sons and daughters, will perform its ‘seva’ from now onwards. For a while, in the last half-century, it looked as if Bengal’s best days were past it. Today, she has been reborn with the promise of a vibrant new life of prosperity and peace which lies ahead.
(The Author is the Union Minister of Defence)
