Kolkata: After a visit to West Bengal just last month, Union Home Minister Amit Shah is all set to return to the state next week as panchayat polls loom. His itinerary is likely to include a rally in Murshidabad — a district with a 70 per cent Muslim population where the Congress and the Communist Party on India (Marxist) are still a force to be reckoned with.
In a byelection held in February this year, the Congress-Left alliance had wrested the Sagardighi assembly seat in Murshidabad district from the ruling Trinamool Congress. Shah is likely to address a rally in the district on 9 May, according to sources in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Political analyst Udayan Bandopadhyay told ThePrint: “I think the BJP has chosen Murshidabad district for Amit Shah’s rally in order to gain Hindu votes. It had been successful in the district in the 2021 state polls when it wrested the Baharampur (earlier Berhampore) assembly seat from the Congress.”
He added that the “BJP’s desperation is noteworthy since the party has been downsized in the Sagardighi election”.
In 2021, the people of Murshidabad assembly constituency had for the first time picked a BJP MLA, Gouri Shankar Ghosh. However, Ghosh resigned from the BJP’s state unit last year alleging that the party had failed to acknowledge “organisational weaknesses” in West Bengal.
It’s also from Murshidabad district that the CBI on 17 April arrested TMC MLA Jiban Krishna Saha in connection with the alleged teachers’ recruitment scam in the state.
The district has three Lok Sabha seats, one of which is with the Congress (Baharampur) while the TMC has the other two (Murshidabad and Jangipur).
While speaking at a rally in Birbhum district on 14 April during his previous visit to the state, Shah had set the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a target of winning 35 of West Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats in next year’s general election.
During his trip next week, Shah will also mark Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary on 8 May with a visit to the poet’s ancestral home in Jorasanko, Kolkata, followed by a public programme in the city to pay his tributes.
Also read: From UP to Karnataka, Rajasthan to Nagaland — Amit Shah on gruelling trek to win Modi his 3rd term
Shah’s focus on West Bengal
Locket Chatterjee, the BJP MP for Hooghly, told ThePrint that “despite his packed schedule, Amit Shah keeps returning to the state”.
“Amit Shah devoted time to West Bengal during 2021. He is also in constant touch with several intellectuals from the state and has always focussed here,” Chatterjee said.
Shah’s recurring visits to West Bengal are believed to have not only boosted the state BJP’s morale but are also significant politically, given that Trinamool national general secretary and CM Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek is holding a two-month-long ‘Jan Sanjog Yatra’ across the state to solidify the TMC’s grassroots support ahead of the 2024 election.
Speaking to ThePrint about Shah’s visit, TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh termed the minister a “tourist in Bengal” and said the BJP had been rejected by the people of the state.
“He can come as many times as he wants but the BJP will not be able to achieve victory in Bengal. Their dreams for 2024 will be crushed just like in 2021 (when the BJP couldn’t win the state polls),” said Ghosh.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)