New Delhi: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said Thursday she was “shocked again” after Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to 19th-century mystic Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa as “Swami” while marking his birth anniversary.
Ahead of assembly elections in Bengal, Banerjee accused the PM of “cultural insensitivity” towards Bengal’s spiritual icons and sharpened the Trinamool Congress’s pitch that the BJP does not understand the state’s ethos.
Calling the prefix “unprecedented and improper”, Banerjee said Ramakrishna is traditionally revered as “Thakur”, not “Swami” — a title reserved for the ascetic disciples who later established the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission. In the spiritual lexicon of Bengal, she noted, the Ramakrishna Order’s “holy trinity” is remembered as Thakur–Ma–Swamiji: Thakur being Ramakrishna, Ma referring to Sarada Devi, and Swamiji to Swami Vivekananda.
“Yet again, our Prime Minister aggressively displays his cultural insensitivity to great figures of Bengal. Today is the janmatithi of Yugavatara (God’s incarnation in our age) Sri Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsadeva. While trying to hail the great saint on this occasion, our PM added an unprecedented and improper prefix to the great saint’s name, ‘Swami’!” she wrote on X.
“As is well known, Sri Ramakrishna was widely revered as Thakur (literally, God),” she added.
Banerjee also urged Modi to stop redefining Bengal’s Renaissance figures. “I urge the Prime Minister kindly not to discover new prefixes and suffixes for the great Renaissance figures of Bengal who shaped modern India,” she wrote.
TMC Rajya Sabha MP Sukhendu Sekhar Ray reinforced the attack, pointing to Ramakrishna’s pluralist legacy as a rebuke to the BJP. “Sri Sri Paramahansa Dev was the priest of Maa Bhavatarini Devi at Dakshineswar. He also used to visit Churches and Masjid in search of the divine, to pronounce invaluable message of humanity — ‘As many faiths, so many paths’. Does PM or his party believe this?” Ray posted on X.
Reacting to the criticism, BJP MLA Agnimitra Paul said calling the mystic ‘swami’ was not disrespectful.
“All day long, from morning to night, Mamata Banerjee, her spokespersons, and her party spread negativity,” Paul told news agency IANS.
BJP’s Amit Malviya also wrote on X that use of the word ‘swami’ was intended as “mark of respect”, and not a formal designation within the Ramakrishna Order.
The episode is the latest in a series of cultural flashpoints the TMC has used to frame the BJP as an outsider force attempting to appropriate Bengal’s icons — a narrative that serves Banerjee’s long-cultivated positioning as custodian of Bengali pride and sub-national identity.
A similar controversy had erupted when Modi referred to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay as “Bankim Chandra Chatterjee” and, on a separate occasion, as “Bankim da” — a formulation critics said departed from established convention. The BJP dismissed that criticism as political nitpicking even as the TMC amplified it as evidence of what it characterises as the party’s superficial engagement with Bengali history.