Senior Congress leader and MP Shashi Tharoor on Saturday said the south and northeast of India will become "irrelevant" in comparison to the north, as the national narrative is increasingly becoming a Hindi-speaking one.

Tharoor, speaking at the Kolkata Literature Festival, said the idiom of the Indian narrative has "overwhelmingly" moved to the north.

"The south and northeast will become irrelevant as compared to the north," he said.

Referring to a "trivial fact", Tharoor said that in the Parliament, BJP ministers reply in Hindi to questions asked in English, as "this is their audience".

"To create a primordially Hindu rashtra is a fundamental assault on the very basis of nationhood," the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said during a session on 'Disorder, Darkness and the Tharoor way'.

Tharoor said the old idiom that when Bengal catches cold, India sneezes, is no more true. "Instead, now if northern India catches the cold, Bengal and Kerala sneeze. It is their cold affecting us."

He said one magical thing about the country is that one can be a good Bengali, a good Muslim, but also a good Indian.

"You are secure of your different identities because you are secure of your Indian identity guaranteed by the Constitution," the three-time Congress MP added.

Meanwhile, the MP on Saturday also condemned the incident of firing in Shaheen Bagh prior to the Delhi Assembly polls.

“There are so many speeches that are just naked provocations and those are inciting people to behave like this. I find it very sad that our political discourse has cheapened at such a level. People are impressionable to go and take the speeches of leaders like ‘goli maro salo ko’, seriously,” Shashi Tharoor told the media in Kolkata. He also added that ‘politics is not about violence, but should be a contest of ideas and ideologies.

(With inputs from IANS and PTI)