Kolkata: After Visheshwar Hegde Kageri, a Lok Sabha member elected from Uttar Kannada, a minister of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s government in Madhya Pradesh, Inder Singh Parmar, embarrassed the saffron party in West Bengal and handed over to the ruling Trinamool Congress another weapon to attack its principal challenger in the state.

Parmar accused 19th-century social reformer Raja Rammohan Roy of working as “an agent of the British” and starting a “vicious cycle of religious conversion”. The TMC immediately launched an offensive, alleging that the BJP and its leaders had consistently insulted the doyens of Bengal's Renaissance and the state's cultural and literary icons. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party had recently raised the same allegation after Kageri had claimed that Nobel l

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