Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while concluding his two-day visit to the state of West Bengal, had a light-hearted and candid conversation with several media persons, and gave out multiple talking points, which give a sense about the most important issues which will be raised by the BJP during the aggressive campaign of unseating Mamata Banerjee and her TMC from power, early next year. Like he had said prior to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, that the saffron party would win around 20 seats from Bengal, this time too, the Home Minister has stated that the BJP will win over 200 seats in next year’s assembly elections.
“When I had said in 2018 at the Kolkata press club that we could get 22 seats in parliament, many people there had laughed. Today when I say BJP will get 200 seats in Bengal next year, I am happy to see no one in this room is laughing. Today it is my turn to smile,” an upbeat Home Minister told reporters as he culminated his important two-day visit to the politically volatile state. A visit by Amit Shah was needed, since many organisational issues of the BJP needed to be immediately addressed, not to mention the many gaping fault lines which needed to be plugged to ensure that the party puts up a united and unsparing front against the TMC.
The Home Minister, who is slated to personally oversee the BJP’s campaign in West Bengal and lead it from the front, also made it a point to launch a scathing attack against Mamata Banerjee in particular, and the TMC regime in general. While reminding the people of Bengal that they have previously given chances to the Left, Congress and TMC, Amit Shah asked for the same chance, saying that the BJP would build a ‘Shonar Bangla’ (Golden Bengal) in five years straight, while also completely securing the state’s borders with Bangladesh, which will put an end to illegal infiltration.
“In 2011, Bengal saw Parivartan (change) with Mamata Banerjee’s slogan of Maa, Mati, Manush (Mother, Motherland, People). Bengal had high hopes then but now that slogan has turned into appeasement, autocracy and extortion,” the Home Minister said. Amit Shah also reminded the media, and through them, the general public, that “In Bengal, there are three laws, one law for the vote bank, or minorities; one law for the nephew; and one law for the rest of the ordinary citizens.” As a matter of fact, at the very outset of the press meet, Shah had said, “Mamata Banerjee has only one ambition, to make her nephew the next chief minister. Does Bengal want a dynastic rule?”
Raising the issue of political killings in the state of Bengal, Amit Shah said that over 100 BJP workers had been killed in Bengal in the last two-and-a-half years and, in most cases, there were no FIRs, no arrests and no charge sheets. He then revealed that West Bengal was the only state which has not been sharing its crime date with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) since 2018. “What are you trying to hide?” he probed.
The battle for West Bengal is going to be by far the most aggressive one which the BJP has ever fought. Faced with an authoritarian regime which they hope to oust, the saffron party has begun the struggle of liberating Bengal from the clutches of those who have had it too good for too long.