Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has announced that Miyanpur village in Lakhimpur Kheri district will be renamed Ravindra Nagar in honour of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The decision was announced during a public event on Saturday, where the government distributed land ownership certificates to displaced Bengali Hindu families.
Speaking at the gathering in Lucknow, Yogi Adityanath criticised the Congress party for originally naming the village Miyanpur, claiming it was an attempt to conceal the fact that the settlement was home to Hindu refugees rather than Muslims. “Not a single Miyan lived there,” he said, adding that the renaming would now reflect the village’s true identity and its connection to India’s cultural heritage through Tagore.
The village is inhabited by Bengali Hindu families who fled persecution in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) during the 1947 Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
At Saturday’s event, Yogi distributed land rights certificates to 331 such families as part of a larger initiative that has so far benefited around 1,000 displaced families from the 1947 and 1971 migrations. He noted that the initial 1,031 families who settled in Uttar Pradesh have now grown to more than 5,000.
Yogi blamed successive Congress governments for denying these families ownership rights for decades while still seeking their votes. “We have provided land rights to 1,000 families who came from Bangladesh in 1947 and 1971. Bangladesh rejected these people and seized their land and ancestral property. But even after the tragedy, Congress did not give rights to those who came here,” he told the largely Bengali audience.
He further accused the Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP) and Trinamool Congress (TMC) of practising “appeasement politics” and failing to support persecuted minorities. The Chief Minister credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the principle of ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’ for finally recognising these families as “Bangla-speaking citizens of India” rather than outsiders.
In addition to the land rights distribution, Yogi inaugurated and laid foundation stones for 213 development projects worth ₹417 crore across three assembly constituencies in the region. He promised that ownership rights would be extended to all displaced families living in Lakhimpur Kheri, Pilibhit, Rampur and Bijnor.
