Mamata Banerjee Announces Stipend For Hindu Priests, Tries To Woo Hindus Before Bengal Elections

With the West Bengal Assembly election of 2021 drawing near and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) poised to offer a serious challenge, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress government appear to be pulling no stops to try and win back some of the Hindu support it has lost to the BJP. On September 11, she announced her government would be paying Hindu priests an honorarium of Rs.1,000 a month and building houses under the Bangla Avaash Yojana for those have no house of their own.

Addressing a press conference, Mamata pointed out that while the Wakf Board provides Imams and Muezzins of the State a stipend and an honorarium, there are no such provisions for Hindu priests. “The brahmin priests of the Sanatan Dharma who for years carry out prayers in temples, have never received any help from the government. There is a section among them who are very poor…. I had meetings with representatives of the Sanatan Dharma and they had asked for a plot of land, which we gave in Kolaghat. We took Re.1 for the land, after clearing it from the Cabinet. They will be making a Sanatan Dharma pilgrim site here,” said Mamata. She said the representatives of the Sanatan Dharma had also requested her to assist those priests who are particularly poor. “There are several thousand of them… we have already received a list of 8,000,” she said.

One of the reasons the State government decided to extend the honorarium to Hindu priests was because “they also maintain ties with different parts of the society and uphold our culture. Please do not misinterpret this,” said Mamata, claiming she would do the same for any religion. “Just as we build cremation sites, we also make burial grounds…,” said Mamata. She said the government had also given ISKCON 700 acres of land. “They will be constructing a temple and a pilgrim site there.”

#MamataBanerjee #WestBengal #HinduPriests

Subscribe to Swarajya on YouTube.

Get a Swarajya subscription: https://subscriptions.swarajyamag.com...

Website: https://swarajyamag.com/
Twitter:   / swarajyamag  
Facebook:   / swarajyamag