There is an age-old adage, ‘Don’t play the odds, play the man’ and in the case of union home minister and BJP leader Amit Shah, it seems like he has taken heart to this particular adage, which neatly brings us along to the whirlwind door-to-door campaign he conducted in Bhawanipur yesterday, seeking support for party candidate Rudranil Ghosh.
“Cast your vote for lotus symbol,” Shah was heard telling the residents with folded hands whilst adding, “Didi failed to check appeasement politics in Bengal.”
Few more from Bhabanipur’s door to door campaign. #BJP200PlusInBengal pic.twitter.com/wuuKmeaZyz
— Amit Shah (Modi Ka Parivar) (@AmitShah) April 9, 2021
“Sonar Bangla Abhiyan will begin from Kolkata. Kolkata will remain the ‘City of Joy’ and we will also work to transform it into ‘City of Future’. We will make a Rs 22,000 crore Kolkata Development Fund for infrastructural strengthening,” the union home minister further announced during his campaign.
Shah’s sudden visit to the families living in the dilapidated slums of the area must have done the trick as families were over the moon to have met the BJP stalwart.
“We are happy that he came and saw us. We never thought someone like him would come to our slum and meet us. We have the habit of seeing him only on TV,” one of the slum dwellers, Krishna Mahakal was quoted as saying by India Today.
The BJP star campaigner decided to take the traditional approach of garnering the votes in Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s current bastion where surprisingly she has not decided to contest the 2021 assembly elections. Mamata changed her seat from Bhawanipur to Nandigram to counter TMC-turned-BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari’s sway over the entirety of South Bengal.
Mamata feared that giving a free rein to Adhikari to go about his campaigning business in Nandigram and the adjoining areas would push her party so far that it would be near impossible to fashion a comeback. Thus, initially it was decided that Didi would contest from both Nandigram and Bhawanipur.
Read more: Mamata Banerjee called PM Modi an ‘outsider’, but she is now caught in her own web in Nandigram
However, after BJP casually challenged Mamata for playing it safe, an enraged Didi quickly took the bait and decided that she will camp in Nandigram and orchestrate her entire poll campaign from there.
Rattled by the door-to-door campaign of Amit Shah, the state CM whilst addressing a rally in Memari in Purba Bardhaman district called Shah a rioter.
“I have not seen such a ‘gunda’ (gangster), ‘dangabaaz’ (rioter) home minister in my entire life. Amit Shah is more dangerous than a tiger. People fear talking to him. I will urge PM Narendra Modi to control Amit Shah first. He is inciting riots here,” said Banerjee.
While Mamata resorted to abusing the Home Minister, an unperturbed Amit Shah went about his usual business. BJP is playing the long game of decimating TMC and Mamata by working round the clock to clinch Bhawanipur as well. Several media reports have already stated that Nandigram is falling into BJP’s lap, courtesy the high voter turnout, especially women voters, which inadvertently is not a good sign for any ruling party.
Thus, by assimilating Bhawanipur in its fold, BJP and Amit Shah are trying to keep Mamata at bay, should she try to fall back on the constituency after her impending defeat in Nandigram. Every political leader needs a strong home base where he/she can usurp the swelling support to fuel their future political ambitions.
However, the public is enraged that Mamata dropped her constituency like a sack of potatoes and parachuted to a seat where she had barely put a foot in the last 5-6 years.
If BJP does indeed manage to rout TMC in Bhawanipur, the gates will be shut down for Mamata in the state and she will have to find new alternatives, which certainly would not be an easy task by any stretch of imagination — especially if the saffron party comes into power.
