For example, in the Geographical Indications Registry of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, ‘Champagne’ is registered by the Comité Interprofessional du Vin de Champagne (CIVC), a group of wine producers, cooperatives and traders from the province of Champagne in northeastern France. represents a group. , According to the GI, all sparkling white wines sold in India under the description of ‘Champagne’ – whether Dom Pérignon or Taittinger – can only be from Champagne.
Similarly, after the Indian Patent Office registered ‘basmati’ in 2017 as a long-grain rice grown only in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, western Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, India has registered a protected GI Applied for the position in the European Union. Basmati in 2020. If and when registered by the European Union – which has been challenged by Pakistan – any other variety of rice sold as ‘basmati’ across the world would be illegal.
Very smartly, the GI Registry of India – after a very bitter fight between Odisha and West Bengal over the place of origin of Rasagola/Rasagola – in 2017 designated West Bengal to ‘Banglar Rasgulla’ and Odisha to ‘Odisha Rasgulla’ as the GI graded. In 2019, it left generic sweets free to be made and sold from Punjabi kitchens in Delhi’s Gol Market and elsewhere.
GI allows parties to claim credit for their products and protect them from interlopers. But a new form of Geographical Indication has emerged. Geographical areas are being ‘tagged’ by their perceived negative qualities and bad reputation.
Rudyard Kipling called late 19th-century Lahore the ‘city of dreadful nights’ – not Calcutta, as many self-racist Bengalis think – and more recently, Donald Trump called Haiti, El Salvador and African countries ‘shitholes’. ‘ Told. , bound by the racism of patent leather. But now we have Indians who indulge in GI-based misuse of territories within India.
For example, Mamata Banerjee, like many other gentlemen in her state, has GI-tagged Uttar Pradesh for rape. Rape is not credible in any other state like Bengal. Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the state government’s trademark Biswa Bangla (Global Bengal) fair on Tuesday, the West Bengal CM had criticized the way the media covered the 14-year-old gangrape case in Nadia district – not Noida – on April 4. And dying the next day. One of the accused arrested five days later is the son of Trinamool Congress block president Samar Gola.
When Didi – remarkably ‘big sister’ in Bengali and Hindi – erupted in front of VIPs and audience: ‘Would you call this a ‘rape’? Or call it ‘pregnant’? Or call it ‘love affairs’ (sic)? I asked the police, ‘as if telling of an exchange between Hamlet and Polonius whether the cloud was shaped like a camel, or a mongoose, or a whale.
‘The incident is bad, the arrest has been made. But the boy apparently had a love affair with the girl, I heard… If a boy and a girl have an affair, I can’t stop it. It is not Uttar Pradesh that I am going to do ‘love jihad’. Saying this, Banerjee said such arrests “do not happen in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan or Delhi”. This happens only in Bengal.
Banerjee geographically identified the ‘Hindi heartland’ as a region where rapes are a dime a dozen, without any judicial or social consequences. This clearly GI-tagging is an administrative and cultural insult that no one else can claim.
The fact is that this week alone, two other cases of rape – a teenager found hanging from a tree in Bankura, and a 40-something woman in South 24 Parganas – were not recorded in Unnao or Hathras, but ‘over there’ was recorded. No one should be distracted by what Didi is saying in Shonar Bangla: Rape is GI-tagged for ‘North Bharat’, making the rape of a minor by a party worker’s son unlikely. Because the ubiquitous brand of Bengal is ‘Love Affairs’.
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