From screening Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bengal rallies at its Uttar Pradesh headquarters to organising “meet and greets” with party MPs from the eastern state, the BJP is leaving no stone unturned to reach out to Bengalis ahead of the two-phased Assembly election in West Bengal.
Last Saturday, as Modi addressed a rally at the Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata and said the “countdown” to the end of the Trinamool Congress government led by Mamata Banerjee had begun, Vinod Banerjee at the BJP headquarters cheered and clapped while breaking into the slogan: “Bengal mein parivartan ki darkar, chahiye BJP sarkar (Bengal needs change and a BJP government).”
To connect with the audience in predominantly Hindi-speaking Lucknow, BJP leader Dimple Datta repeated the slogan in Bangla after him.
Banerjee said he wanted a BJP government in Bengal to ensure the “effective implementation” of central schemes. “Currently, people are not able to avail the benefits of the Centre’s schemes because the TMC government is not implementing them properly,” he said.
While a few other BJP leaders followed Datta in sloganeering, a sizeable portion of the audience appeared unimpressed. Among those who remained silent was Samarjeet Mitra, who was at the party office upon the invitation of a BJP leader.
“I have been in Lucknow for about three decades and am concerned about the politics of Uttar Pradesh as well as Bengal. I often discuss issues related to Bengal with my relatives in Medinipur, but I do not persuade them to vote for any particular party. They should choose whom to vote for based on their own analysis,” he said.
Mitra, a voter in Lucknow, was among scores of Bengalis the BJP had invited in cities across UP such as Varanasi, Noida, and Pilibhit, as well as in Bihar, which borders Bengal, to watch the live streaming of the PM’s rally.
The invitees in Lucknow were welcomed by UP BJP chief Pankaj Chaudhary and state general secretary Subhash Yaduvansh, who also heads the party’s Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat initiative. The campaign aims to reach out to Bengalis across the country ahead of the Assembly polls scheduled for April 23 and 29, with the results to be declared on May 4.
Before the PM’s address began, a huge LED screen flashed videos in Bangla targeting the “corrupt” TMC government while appealing to people to vote for the BJP.
BJP leaders fanning out
Last month, the BJP’s Ranaghat MP Jagannath Sarkar travelled to Lucknow to meet office-bearers of Durga Puja committees and members of the Bengali community.
Alleging that Bengal was “moving backward” under the TMC and that only the BJP could take it forward, Sarkar told a gathering of such people: “The Bengali community is present in all the states of the country. It is the responsibility of each one of them to awaken Bengal and bring change there… I have come to Lucknow to bring the community together and appeal to them to unite and save democracy in Bengal.”
“Sarkar told us many things about the TMC government and asked us to tell our relatives in Bengal to support the BJP in the upcoming elections,” said Mitra, who attended the interaction with the MP in Rabindrapalli.
Similarly, senior party leaders have travelled to Bihar, Goa and other states to take the BJP’s message to people ahead of the Bengal polls.
Sources said Union Minister Sukanta Majumdar has been assigned Varanasi, the Prime Minister’s constituency, while former Union Minister Nisith Pramanik has been tasked with interacting with the Bengali community in Noida.
Bihar re-run
The BJP’s Bengali outreach is similar to the one it undertook for nearly two crore non-resident Biharis ahead of last year’s Bihar Legislative Assembly election.
The party had deployed 75 two-member teams, comprising a senior BJP leader and an office-bearer or senior party worker, in various parts of the country. Under the Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat initiative, the BJP held seven programmes each in Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Haryana; six each in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Punjab; five in Delhi; two each in Assam, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Karnataka; and one each in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.