Shakespeare famously asked, “What’s in a name?” implying that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. In the high-stakes theatre of Indian politics, especially in culturally-wired West Bengal, Shakespeare couldn’t have been more wrong. A name isn’t just a label. They are passcodes into a shared cultural memory. Get them wrong, and you’re not just mispronouncing a syllable, you’re announcing you don’t belong.

By now, Narendra Modi should have understood that in Bengal’s ruthless political arena, a slip of the tongue is rarely just a mistake – unless you’re Mamata Banerjee with a different kind of immunity. For the Bharatiya Janata Party, the core challenge in the state has always been the “outsider” tag. To counter Trinamool Congress’s nativist appeal, Modi has repeatedly tried to stitch himself into Bengal’s cultural fabric. And in doing so, he often walks into a trap of his own making.

One of the most telling instances came in the Lok Sabha this week, when Modi referred to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay as “Bankim da”. One could see what he was trying to do. In a debate marking 150 years of Vande Mataram, he reached for a Bengali touch of intimacy, adding the affectionate da, meaning brother, to Bankim Chandra’s name. 

In Gujarat, or in the Hindi belt, such improvisations might pass unnoticed. In Bengal, however, they land with a thud.

Within seconds, TMC MPs pounced. “You should say Bankim Babu,” Saugata Roy cut in. Modi, to his credit, promptly corrected himself, thanked Roy and switched to “Bankim Babu” for the rest of his speech. But the damage was done.

Outside parliament, TMC turned “Bankim da” into a meme and a metaphor. Proof, they said, that the prime minister was a cultural outsider play-acting at Bengali familiarity.

“It is a textbook fish-out-of-water moment for @BJP4India. For years, these BOHIRAGOTO interlopers have tried to dishonestly appropriate Bengal’s cultural icons, hoping that borrowed reverence might compensate for their utter political bankruptcy in the state. Each attempt has only exposed how grotesquely alien they are to Bengal’s cultural consciousness, history, and vocabulary,” TMC said in a post on X.

“In a clumsy, performative display of CULTURAL COSPLAY, @narendramodi, insultingly patronising as always, refers to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay as “Bankim da.” No, Modi ji, Bengal does not casually slap the suffix “da” onto figures it venerates. Only a CULTURAL ILLITERATE would think that sounds respectful,” the party added in the same post.

In Bengal, specific honourifics matter. “Babu” implies reverence for the canonised. You do not casually call Rabindranath Tagore or Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay by a sibling suffix. 

Bengalis do use “da” for some revered personalities – “Master da” Surya Sen, “Manik da” for Satyajit Ray, but the unwritten rule is clear. That intimacy is earned, organic, rooted in real social memory. It is almost never retrofitted onto 19th-century icons via a Delhi-based speechwriter. 

The warmth Modi tried to project felt manufactured, and that is what TMC hammered. It was not just a gaffe, but a presumptuous attempt to appropriate Bengal’s icons. By misapplying the suffix, he didn’t just make a linguistic mistake, he validated the TMC’s accusation that he is “grotesquely alien” to Bengal’s cultural consciousness.

This is not an isolated case. Modi has repeatedly attempted to court Bengali sentiment through cultural gestures and symbolic overtures, yet each effort has spectacularly backfired.

His 2018 Mann Ki Baat anecdote about waking up at 5:30 AM as a child to listen to Rabindra Sangeet on the radio, is a classic example. It’s a lovely story. Young Narendra, pre-dawn, absorbing Tagore’s songs he doesn’t even linguistically understand, yet spiritually connects with.

The only problem was All India Radio’s schedule.

Fact-checkers quickly pointed out that AIR’s morning transmission in those years didn’t start as early as 5:30 AM, and that the Rabindra Sangeet slot came significantly later. 

Then came the 2021 Bengal campaign. The longer beard that suddenly invited “Modi as Tagore” comparisons with right-wing social media influencers gushing about the “Gurudev” look. The outcome was predictable. 

“Just by growing a long beard nobody becomes Rabindranath Tagore,” Mamata sniped, and everyone got the joke.

But let’s not pretend the gaffe economy is a Modi monopoly. Mamata Banerjee has her own rich catalogue, and her opponents know it line by line.

Mamata Banerjee's own set of gaffes

In 2009, long before she became chief minister, Banerjee famously recalled Rabindranath Tagore offering juice to Mahatma Gandhi to break his fast in Kolkata during the 1947 Kolkata riots.

This otherwise poignant statement had one fatal flaw. Tagore had been dead six years by then.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist), then in power, gleefully weaponised the slip. “How can someone who gets basic dates wrong lead a state that worships Tagore?” they asked, playing to the bhadralok gallery. It did nothing to halt her rise.

And then there are the more surreal moments. The mysterious “Dohar Babu” no one can identify (Dahar is Santhali word for a road), or the Kolkata Book Fair proclamation that Tagore had a great camaraderie with Shakespeare and Keats, all of whom were separated by decades or centuries.

The problem is not merely that politicians misremember names or references. The deeper danger is that these errors allow politics to retreat entirely into the symbolic and superficial, successfully diverting attention from substantive issues. 

Bengal’s political discourse repeatedly circles back to cultural identity markers. Whether it is Vande Mataram, Jai Shri Ram, or other emotive symbols, these debates resurface cyclically, each time reigniting old divisions. 

With “Bankim da”, the prime minister thus handed the three-time Bengal chief minister another springboard to direct public debate from governance to symbolism. It is just what she needed.

Soon after the gaffe, Mamata escalated with her own theatre. She dramatically tore up a central government note on MGNREGA conditions at a public rally, shifting the focus from technical questions of funding and compliance to a visually potent “battle for dignity and rights” that cast her as Bengal’s fierce defender against a “disrespectful” Union government.

It is a ready-made “dead cat” strategy. Throw a shocking distraction onto the table so everyone argues over the spectacle instead of the uncomfortable reality of poor governance. It doesn’t matter if the new issue is outrageous, irrelevant, or even damaging. The goal is to change the conversation, and both Modi and Mamata are seasoned at it. 

While both Modi and Mamata have historically survived these gaffes because their core bases vote on charisma and delivery rather than academic precision, the consequence remains. 

 So, what is truly in a name? In the hyper-connected, meme-ready era of Indian politics, a big deal to distract real issues facing the citizens.

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