New Delhi: BJP president J.P. Nadda is set to kick-start his party’s West Bengal campaign from the Bhabanipur assembly constituency in South Kolkata, represented by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Wednesday.
Nadda, who is on a 120-day national tour to look for new ground that the party can capitalise on for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, will spend two days in the eastern state that is set for an intriguing assembly election in 2021.
BJP leaders told ThePrint that Nadda has chosen Mamata’s constituency to drive home the message that the party is a direct threat to the chief minister. The BJP has been steadily making gains in West Bengal.
“The BJP president will visit one slum area in Bhabanipur to understand what the chief minister has done for her constituency,” BJP MP and party general secretary in West Bengal, Locket Chatterjee, told ThePrint.
“While the chief minister says she has done enough work for the Bengali manush and that she is the pride of Bengalis, we want to show the lack of development in these slums despite it being part of an urban seat,” Chatterjee added. “We want to expose the fault lines in the chief minister’s development narrative.”
According to Chatterjee, Nadda will hold a meeting of party workers in Bhabanipur to work out a strategy and take stock of preparations to defeat Mamata in her constituency.
“He will visit many homes in the constituency to understand their problems and brief the Prime Minister,” Chatterjee said. “He will also visit the Kalimath temple and inaugurate the new BJP office.”
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The importance of Bhabanipur to the BJP
The BJP believes that it can defeat the chief minister in Bhabanipur due to the demography of the constituency.
According to a BJP leader who did not want to be named, the assembly seat has around 2 lakh voters, about 60 per cent of whom belong to the Marwari, Sikh and Gujarati communities. The BJP is banking on these communities.
The BJP leader added that 6 per cent of Bhabanipur’s electorate are Muslim while the rest are Bengali Hindus.
In the 2016 assembly elections, the BJP had fielded Chandra Kumar Bose, the grand nephew of Subhas Chandra Bose while the Congress had fielded Deepa Dasmunsi, the wife of party veteran, the late Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi.
Mamata, however, won easily by over 55,000 votes. She first won from Bhabanipur in a bypoll in 2011 when her trusted lieutenant Subrata Bakshi vacated the seat for her. She had won by 54,000 votes then.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, however, the BJP, which had fielded Bose again, finished second in the South Kolkata Parliamentary constituency but secured some 4,71,000 votes. Bhabanipur falls under the South Kolkata Lok Sabha seat.
“We got a sizeable vote in both Parliamentary elections and we are on the verge of ensuring that Mamata is at risk in her safe seat,” Locket Chatterjee said. “You can see how we are fighting the Bengal election when the party president is initiating the campaign from the chief minister’s constituency.”
BJP South Kolkata district president Shankar Sikdar said people in the state are looking for change. “Earlier the situation was different,” he said. “Mamata was invincible but now things have changed. People want change in the state and want to give the BJP a chance. Mamata fears this and there is talk of her fighting from two seats.”
A BJP vice-president who did not want to be named said intense campaigning in Bhabanipur will increase pressure on the chief minister.
“Mamata may not lose her seat but we want to increase psychological pressure on her to make her believe she will lose,” he said. “And who knows in politics? If two to three of her strong leaders desert her in the coming days, the situation will be different. She will start making mistakes once she gets a feeling of losing the elections. Our campaign in her constituency will send a message to the entire state.”
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The BJP election machine
The BJP has decided to deploy all of its 18 MPs in West Bengal in door-to-door campaigning in the coming days. Party sources said they have been instructed to tell people that the Mamata government has not implemented the Modi government’s flagship schemes such as Ayushman Bharat and Kisan Samman Nidhi, under which farmers get Rs 6,000 annually.
A BJP source said that the party had instructed every central minister and those from other states to take time out for the door-to-door campaign.
Over the past few days, Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda was in North Bengal, Culture Minister Prahlad Patel was in Cooch Behar, Water Resources Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat in North Kolkata and the Bangoan region at the Bangladesh border.
“In line with Amit Shah’s plan, we are completing the first round of organisation programme,” Sayantan Basu, the BJP West Bengal general secretary, told ThePrint. “We are carrying out activities from the booth to the state level. Around 23 poll activities will go on simultaneously in our bid to win Bengal.”
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