Controversy over naming airport after Tagore

Agartala: Tripura Assembly’s collective devotion to Rabindranath Tagore — reflected in its passing of a private member’s resolution that proposed to rename Agartala airport after Asia’s first Nobel laureate — has put one of India’s greatest literary icons in an unsavoury controversy in the 150th year of his birth.
On June 29, Congress legislator Sudip Roy Barman had proposed during the just-concluded budget session of the Assembly that Agartala airport be renamed after Tagore. Chief minister Manik Sarkar immediately welcomed the suggestion and said it was a “very good proposal”.
Next day, the matter was tabled in the Assembly in the form of a private member’s resolution and passed by the House almost unanimously.
However, Bijay Kumar Hrangkhawal, the president of Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura and a former rebel leader, refused to support the resolution on the ground that he had earlier pleaded for renaming of the airport after Tripura’s last king, Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya.
With the conclusion of the Assembly session on July 2, the issue seemed to have been swept off the public agenda but murmurs of dissent came to the fore even from leading Bengali intellectuals. Journalist and author Swapan Bhattacharya penned an article in a local daily protesting against the proposal to rename the airport after Tagore.
13/07/10 Sekhar Datta/The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports Jul 2010