In such mundane discretionary things that are not determined by the constitution, the Indian Union exhibits its deep ideology – that there is Indian and there is Indian. In making explicit whose festivals are 'national' and whose are variants/'regional', it also defines the 'core' of the 'nation' and by implication, the periphery. By the time this diktat reaches the 'periphery', the order gets reversed. In the official calendars of many Union government funded offices of West Bengal, 11 November is marked as a red-letter (signifying compulsory) holiday and its called Deepavali. That's how this auspicious occasion is known in West Bengal and its not very widely celebrated in West Bengal in the first place. What matters around that time in Bengal is the Union government office working day that falls a day before. That is Kali Pujo – the worship of Ma Kali, the dark mother of Bengali shaktos.

The West Bengal government, being answerable to the people of Bengal who have their own sense of what's core and what's periphery, does not mix this up. As far as West Bengal is concerned, the primacy of Kali Pujo over any other festival around that time is explicit in the West Bengal government's official holiday list. Here, as per the official notification numbered NO. 5201-F(P) dated 14 October 2014 from the Department of Finance, 10 November 2015 is a state government holiday of account of Kalipuja. In the same notification, 11 November 2015 is also a state government holiday, not as Deepavali/Diwali but on account of immersion of Goddess Kali. Government of Bangladesh officially considers 10 November as an optional holiday for Hindus on account of Shyama Puja (Shyama being a name for Ma Kali). There is no mention of any optional holiday on 10 November associated with Ma Kali in Government of India circulars. Kali Pujo is not Deepavali or Diwali. She may not make it to the calendar from Delhi but that doesn't affect her dominance that much. Bengal is Ma Kali land. The scale of celebrations is testimony to the fact that Delhi's non-acknowledgement of this holiday is irrelevant.

The second-class treatment that Delhi provides to certain things is not limited to religious festivals. It extends to political persona too and here also, Bangladesh fares better than Indian Union in commemorating certain martyrs. A case in point is that of Shurjo Sen, the commander-in-chief of armed anti-imperialist militant revolutionaries of Chittagong, under whose daring leadership the area was briefly liberated from Britain and its largely Indian policemen. A provisional revolutionary government was proclaimed. British sent armed British, Indians and Gurkhas to crush these revolutionaries. Shurjo Sen was captured, tortured and killed – his body was sunk in the Bay of Bengal as they were frightened of the power of this legendary leader even after death. Recent events in Bangladesh have shown that they were not completely mistaken.

Bollywood may try as hard as it can to make Shurjo Sen speak Hindi for its Hindustani audience to make some money out of the sacred memory of this martyr but the Indian Union is incapable giving ShurjoSen the kind of status that he enjoys in the People's Republic of Bangladesh. Bollywood “introduced” many in the Indian Union to Shurjo Sen. In Bengal's larger eastern part, he needs no such introduction. After the recent hanging of widely hated war-criminal Salauddin Quader Chowdhury for his crimes against humanity including mass-torture and killings of the Hindus in Raozan and Boalkhali in Chittagong, Shafiqul Chowdhury, the former mayor of Raozan said, “We cannot allow a notorious war criminal like Saka Chowdhury to be buried in the sacred soil of Raozan where revolutionary Master Da Surya Sen was born. ” One should be under no illusion that it is in East Bengal and not West Bengal, the People's Republic of Bangladesh and not the Indian Union are the contemporary inheritors of the Shurjo Sen's legacy. New Delhi finds no token use of him (no full-page adverts on birthdays or naming of universities) and Bollywood distorts him for cash gains while trying to dominate the contemporary imagination and false memory of Shurjo Sen among rootless cultural illiterates. He looms large as a living presence in the political idiom of present-day East Bengal. From the marginalization of Ma Kali by Diwali to the irrelevance of Shurjo Sen and his Bengali-Chittagonian essence to the Indian Union, the holy mother and one of her finest children are united as incompatibles in homogenizing narrative of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. The holy mother Kali cannot be abandoned. Humans create narratives. Humans didn’t create Ma Kali. Ma Kali is bigger than any narrative, however powerful, however well-funded, however aggressive. In a fair fight, the holy mother is invincible. (IPA Service)