Assam Cabinet minister's wife calls out trend of "dragging" families into politics

Assam's noted litterateur and wife of a senior cabinet minister, Rita Chowdhury has criticised the trend of "dragging" wives and children into political disputes. 

Her statement comes at a time when top rival political leaders of Assam are trading charges over each other's families.

Rita Chowdhury, a former director of National Book Trust, India, and a Sahitya Akademi award winning author, who is married to senior state minister Chandra Mohan Patowary of the BJP, criticised the "new trend" of involving family members in political discourse.

"I oppose all low mentality tendencies of unnecessarily dragging their own or others wife-children into politics," she wrote in a post on Facebook on Thursday.

“I hope that this new negative trend in our society ends soon,” Chowdhury, who is currently the editor of an Assamese literary magazine, added.

The post on the social media site, titled ‘Pan shop, Baba Maina and our self-respect’, presents her criticism of her husband’s recent public statement regarding their children, whom they affectionately call Baba and Maina.

In the post in Assamese, Chowdhury, a former associate professor of Cotton University, narrates the upbringing of the two children and their present independent standing in life, dismissing Patowary’s purported assertion that the two kids would be hapless without their parents.

Her statement against bringing in families into political discourse at the end of the long post assumes significance in view of the current ongoing spat between Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi, who has been named the new state party president.

Sarma has been alleging Pakistani links of Gogoi’s British wife Elizabeth Colburn and questioning the citizenship of the two minor children of the couple, while the Congress leader has countered by posing questions on business transactions in the name of Sarma’s wife and children.