India News | Senior Assam Minister's Wife Criticises 'dragging' Families into Political Disputes

Guwahati, May 30 (PTI) At a time when top rival political leaders of Assam are trading charges over each other's families, a noted litterateur and wife of a senior cabinet minister has called out this trend of "dragging" wives and children into political disputes.

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.

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"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.

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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.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)