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HomeOpinionTathagata Roy is India's first toxic Twitter governor

Tathagata Roy is India’s first toxic Twitter governor

Roy spews hatred towards Muslims and Nehru, revels in conspiracy theories and is called a 'rockstar governor' on Twitter.

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When Tathagata Roy, the 73-year-old governor of Meghalaya, tweeted an appeal from a retired colonel of the Indian Army, without naming him, to “boycott everything Kashmiri”, he set off a storm, eliciting condemnation from across the political spectrum. This even prompted Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad from the BJP to say that he didn’t agree with Roy.

But it was not the first time the governor has made news for the wrong reasons. Unlike most of his contemporaries who at least attempt to be worthy of the gravitas once they are elevated to the constitutional position, Roy has been happy to find an even wider audience for his often toxic views. These can best be described as a relentless spewing of hatred towards Muslims and conspiracy theories about the deaths of Right-wing ideologues Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.

Throw into the mix a visceral abhorrence for Jawaharlal Nehru and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. And we have an educated chauvinist and a seemingly urbane communalist, who is able to eloquently articulate the RSS’ deepest, darkest antipathies to the secular nature of the Constitution.

It is what makes Tathagata Roy a popular Right-wing figure, followed by over 97,000 people on Twitter. Some call him a “rockstar governor” and demand that his account be verified.


Also read: Mohan Bhagwat is like RK Laxman’s common man and RSS under him means business


Roy may have twice fought and lost Lok Sabha elections from West Bengal, but on Twitter he is a winner — finding an audience for his views on everything from Bengali Leftists to the Pulwama terror attacks.

As he said in an email interview to me: “Some out-of-the-box thinking is called for. We have persisted for three decades in conventional responses, both political and military, which have brought about thousands of deaths of our security forces and the Paki terrorists, and many non-combatants by way of collateral damage.”

One has to merely read his 19 February tweet to understand what this “out-of-the-box” thinking could be:

Or what this “conventional response” is – as he wrote on 23 March 2015 – commenting on a tweet that questioned the “fighting spirit” of Hindus:

Tathagata Roy is a great advocate of what he calls “hidden history”, according to which in 1944, Mahatma Gandhi, upon C.R. Rajagopalachari’s advice, went to see Jinnah and conceded Pakistan. All other Congress leaders were in jail then. Or his series of tweets on in 2016 linking post-Partition attacks on Hindus in then East Pakistan to the violence in Malda: “On 12 February 1950, all trains crossing the Meghna Bridge at Ashugonj (now Bangladesh) were stopped, all Hindus stabbed and thrown into river…In 1950 pogrom (NOT RIOT) almost all Hindus in villages Muladi, Madhabpasha, Lakutia, Rajapur in Barisal were mercilessly slaughtered… The 1950 bloodbath of Barisal and Meghna Bridge! Young men and women, ask your grandparents what happened? Kaliachak is possibly the last warning.”

Much of Roy’s understanding of history is self-taught. He ascribes it to his stint as a teacher at Jadavpur University, where he was professor and head of the department of construction engineering – he joined the BJP on the same date as joining the university, 2 July 1990.

“Being in touch with young minds was a wonderfully invigorating experience,” Tathagata Roy said. “It also rekindled the bibliophile in me. I eventually started reading history, especially the history of the pre-Independence period in India and became a devout admirer of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee. That was what drove me to write his biography (Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Life and Times, Penguin-Random House India, Gurgaon, 2018). I have also written the Bengali versions of the two books.” Prior to that, he had an excellent record as an officer of the Indian Railways Service of Engineers, working as a general manager, RITES, and chief engineer-design of Metro Railways, Kolkata.


Also read: Governor Tathagata Roy targets Gandhi, blames Nehru for Bengal’s high Muslim population


But he couldn’t escape the radicalisation of his youth. When he was in the fourth year of his course in Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur, in 1965, some Hindu students from East Pakistan University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka (EPUET, now BUET) came and enrolled in his class. “I became friends with them and learnt that they had been subjected to untold persecution (one had been murdered) purely because they were Hindus, in the wake of the Hazratbal incident of Kashmir, with which East Pakistani Hindus had nothing whatever to do. And there was practically no reaction in West Bengal to this. That made me think that there is something basically wrong with what passes for ‘secularism’ in India. I was also exercised over the fact that the exodus of Hindus from erstwhile East Pakistan was completely forgotten, swept under the carpet, even by the very victims among whom my extended family was also there,” he told me. Later, he would write a book about it (My People Uprooted, Synergy Books India, Delhi, 2016).

That acquaintance with the East Pakistani students eventually drove him to the RSS in 1986. He was deeply influenced by Guru M.S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak, calling him an organisational genius, and whose book – Bunch of Thoughts – he would read after he had joined the RSS. Tathagata Roy eventually decided to join the BJP, even though his family was inclined towards the Congress, and ”my younger brother Saugata is in that gharana, currently a Trinamool Congress MP”.

He added: ”We were almost congenitally anti-Left, so were a lot of other people who were embarrassed to say so, because it was then fashionable among Bengalis to be Left.” Saugata Roy is a five-time MLA, three-time MP, as well as a former Union minister.

When the elder Roy joined the BJP in 1990, he was welcomed by Murli Manohar Joshi who was then the observer for West Bengal. L.K. Advani, who had a particular fascination for collecting Bengali intellectuals around him, among them editors Chandan Mitra, who has since joined the TMC, and Swapan Dasgupta, who has become a Rajya Sabha MP, was the BJP president. At that point, says Roy, ”I was just an ordinary member and very far removed from Advaniji. Later I came to know Advaniji very well. He wrote the foreword for my biography of Dr S.P. Mookerjee.”


Also read: The BJP wants to rewrite history so that its politics can be all about ideology


Political analyst Tufail Ahmed says Roy’s tweets are a symptom of a broader movement of ideas taking root in Indian society and based on the principle of counter pluralism. “This proposes exclusion of everything Muslim, whether it the destruction of Jama Masjid, renaming towns and railway stations, or targeting Muslim institutions such as Aligarh Muslim University. As governor, Mr Roy should have supported any message that treats Kashmiris as Indians. By calling for the boycott of everything Kashmiri, he is basically supporting secessionist politics in Kashmir and in fact the exclusion of Kashmir from India.”

University of Pennsylvania scholar Saswati Sarkar who has been tracking his statements also points out that his views on Hindu Bengali refugees from “East Pakistan” are not only utterly racist, but also factually erroneous. Sarkar has co-written articles, which analyse this in detail quoting among other things his tweets such as this from 14 June, 2017: “We gave nation Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Netaji. All revolutionaries listed in Andaman. We also fled East Bengal without protest, chuha-like.”

And then this from 28 November, 2017:

When Sarkar called him out, he blocked her.

Tathagata Roy was president of the BJP in West Bengal between 2002 and 2006, and was appointed the governor of Tripura in 2015, and then of Meghalaya in 2018. He was also briefly the governor of Arunachal Pradesh when Pema Khandu was sworn in as the tenth chief minister after a period of intense instability, which saw both the late Kalikho Pul and Nabam Tuki being ousted.

But the office and its authority have done very little to dampen Roy’s enthusiasm for Twitter or his pet peeves. Quoting former president S. Radhakrishnan on the death of his icon Mookerjee, Tathagata Roy said, “When great wrongs are committed, it is criminal to be silent in the hope that truth will one day find its voice. In a democratic society, one should speak out, especially when we are developing an unequalled power of not seeing what we do not wish to see.”

And he reiterates: ”I formally state that my Twitter statements have not undermined my constitutional authority. That authority is defined by the Constitution itself and as interpreted by the Supreme Court and various high courts, as Article 141 of the Constitution says. I am not obliged to follow anyone’s personal interpretation of the Constitution.”

Especially since he is fortunate enough to occupy a position of authority sanctioned by it.

The author is a senior journalist.

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8 COMMENTS

  1. It was Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who opposed the formula of “Sovereign united Bengal” otherwise; the Bengal would not be divided. Dr. Mukherjee was a Brahmin only thought to live mostly with Brahmins as such he thought to form a “Hindu Home Land” centering Calcutta forgetting the non-Brahmin Hindus of East Bengal. If he could take lessons from Abraham Lincoln he would not oppose Suhrawardy rather he would try to win over him to form a United Bengal like that of the USA. Dr. Mukherjee neither could form a Hindu-Home- Land nor a West Bengal free from Muslims. He had realized later how he was cheated by Nehru, Gandhi, and President Kripanali but in the end, he left Bengal and died in Kashmir. But he will live as a destroyer of Bengal for all the time in the minds of Hindus of East Bengal. Our respected Tathagata Roy might be a supporter of Hindus or RS or BJP but he could not be accepted as sharp intellectuals for the betterment of Bengal and East Bengal Hindus.

  2. It was Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who opposed the formula of “Sovereign united Bengal” otherwise; the Bengal would not be divided. Dr. Mukherjee was a Brahmin only thought to live mostly with Brahmins as such he thought to form a “Hindu Home Land” centering Calcutta forgetting the non-Brahmin Hindus of East Bengal. If he could take lessons from Abraham Lincoln he would not oppose Suhrawardy rather he would try to win over him to form a United Bengal like that of the USA. Dr. Mukherjee neither could form a Hindu-Home- Land nor a West Bengal free from Muslims. He had realized later how he was cheated by Nehru, Gandhi, and President Kripanali but in the end, he left Bengal and died in Kashmir. But he will live as a destroyer of Bengal for all the time in the minds of Hindus of East Bengal. Our respected Tathagata Roy might be a supporter of Hindus or RS or BJP but he could not be accepted as sharp intellectuals for the betterment of Bengal and East Bengal Hindus.

  3. I think it’s abhorrent that the so called reporter (and her/his US based hard left and/or “Capito Commie” pseudo intellectual(s) are a permanent breed of anti Hindu bigots. (and. that too, in India where majority of citizens are Hindus.) The fact of the matter is- In Bangladesh which couldn’t have been free without India’s intervention in the last phase of it’s war of liberation (before 3 million civilians were killed and 250,000 women were raped – disproportionate number of Hindus among them- by the then West Pakistani army) there have been ongoing ethno-religious cleansing , crimes against minority girls and women, mass demolition places of worship, unprecedented & wide scale ‘land grab’ and, millions of internal & external displacement since 1970. As things got much worse since October 2001 – it’s noteworthy that, it’s only the courageous, conscientious and real journalists who spoke truth to power there are Muslims whereas, absolute hypocrisy reigned among most Indian English language journalists and pesudo-intellectuals who are either, too afraid to chronicle such history of crimes against humanity or, are unable to speak out to please the western media and, get plaudits from the movers and shakers of the two Abrahamic religions. . Shame on these guys and girls’ except in so far as it is abundantly clear that’s the only way they can make a living (and prosper.)

  4. What is wrong with him telling the truth, either about Nehru or Mamata? Being a veteran in politics, he probably knows more about what happenned to India. Nehru should not have been the PM. But he was entrusted that by treachery! Country has been suffering since then. The appeasement politics has reached such a stage that if you accept the falsehoods and move on then you are alligned to the oldest party! If you start questioning the motives then you are maligned as religious Hindu fanatic! But i bet 90% of Indians are aligned to the truth, and honestly are looking to correct the historical fallacies! The rest 10% are pseudo sickular, scared and afraid of their identity and with a new tag called urban naxals!!! Jai hind!

  5. I think it’s abhorrent that the so called reporter (and her/his US based hard left and/or “Capito Commie” pseudo intellectual(s) are a permanent breed of anti Hindu bigots. (and. that too, in India where majority of citizens are Hindus.) The fact of the matter is- In Bangladesh which couldn’t have been free without India’s intervention in the last phase of it’s war of liberation (before 3 million civilians were killed and 250,000 women were raped – disproportionate number of Hindus among them- by the then West Pakistani army) there have been ongoing ethno-religious cleansing , crimes against minority girls and women, mass demolition places of worship, unprecedented & wide scale ‘land grab’ and, millions of internal & external displacement since 1970. As things got much worse since October 2001 – it’s note worthy that, it’s only the courageous, conscientious and real journalists who spoke truth to power there, are Muslims whereas, absolute hypocrisy reigned among most Indian English language journalists and pesudo-intellectuals who are either, too afraid to chronicle such history of crimes against humanity or, are unable to speak out to please the western media and, get plaudits from the movers and shakers of the two Abrahamic religions. . Shame on these guys and girls’ except in so far as it is abundantly clear that’s the only way they can make a living (and prosper.)

  6. If Modiji allows him to hold Governor’s office it tantamounts he stands with what Governor has said though in public meeting he had claimed our fight is for Kashmir and Kashmiris.

  7. Though certainly, one cannot subscribe to the view of Governor. But in my view, what he is advocating, is to have a homeostatic system where if repression is done in the name of caste, religious or ethnic divide then it must be responded in that manner. Certainly, subcontinent as a whole has suffered enormously from the Muslim invasion and then from British Raj , which is etched in the memory of India so deep that any talk of appeasement exhumes the very scar. In the guise of pluralism, apparently one cannot go on hurting the sentiment of the majority. Though such check and balances should be done through laws, but what if laws are inept to deal with certain situations. Thus the deep sentiment of history needs to be looked before completely blaming the person. As a nation, we have sailed through a lot of pain and surely we will sail through fundamentalism, terrorism and intolerance growing in the society at large.

  8. It does not suffice to say we do not agree with His unExcellency. His publicly stated views are so outrageously in conflict with his constitutional status and role, he should be sent back to his native Bengal, where he contributed little to its public life.

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