Deb born in Tripura, not B’desh, says aide

KOLKATA/AGARTALA: Tripura chief minister Biplab Deb on Sunday clarified that he was born in India, following a three-day online battle that has seen his Wikipedia profile page being repeatedly changed with a set of editors claiming he was born in Bangladesh.After the final draft of the National Register of Citizens was released on July 30, triggering citizenship debates in Assam , Deb’s Wikipedia page turned into a battleground. A total of 37 edits were made on the page from Thursday to Saturday, which saw his place of birth alternate between Tripura’s Gomati district and Chandpur in Bangladesh.The first major change was recorded at 10.38am on Thursday, when the page was altered to show Deb’s birthplace as Rajdhar Nagar village in Kachua upazila, Chandpur . At 1.11pm, this was changed back to Rajdhar Nagar village in Gomati district. Another major change was made at 2.37pm that day, when the page’s “Early Life” segment described Deb as having been born “as a Bangladeshi on 25 November, 1971, in Kachua upazila, Chandpur.”The next line read: “After illegally shifting to India, he spent his childhood and school days in Tripura”.These two changes were undone at 3.27pm, but the claim that he was born in Kachua upazila remained.The rewritings continued all through Thursday. At 6.37pm, the chief minister was called “Bangladeshi Deb” in the “Early Life” segment. This was undone two minutes later at 6.39pm. Two more minutes later, at 6.41pm, the segment read: “Biplab Deb was born on 25 November 1971. After shifting to India, he spent his childhood and school days in Tripura”.Again, at 8.10pm, the page read: “Biplab Deb was born on 25 November 1971 in Bangladesh; later his parents migrated to India as refugees from Bangladesh in 1971”. Finally, at 9.33pm, Wikipedia protected the page citing “persistent disruptive editing”.However, changes kept being made to Deb’s place of birth on Friday and Saturday. When last checked on Sunday night, the page said he was born in Tripura.The edits did not escape Deb’s attention. “We were aware of the vandalism on Thursday itself. The chief minister’s father, Haradhan, registered himself as a citizen under the Citizenship Act of 1955 on June 27, 1967, as a resident of Udaipur in Tripura,” said Sanjoy Mishra, Deb’s media adviser.He added that Deb was born in Udaipur (now Gomati district headquarters) on November 25, 1971, as opposed to reports on both Indian and Bangladeshi sites that claim he was “conceived” in Bangladesh and born in India. “We think content on Wikipedia and other such sites should be better monitored. There should be regulation of what goes online,” said Mishra. “Such issues are created by people who don’t believe in development politics,” he added.Read this story in Marathi