With an attempt to chalk out the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strategy for the upcoming Lok Sabha election, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president J.P. Nadda on Tuesday arrived in Kolkata and held meetings with the party’s State leadership. The Home Minister and the BJP president set up an election monitoring team with 15 members, which includes Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and State BJP president Sukanta Majumdar.
The ten members of the election management team are drawn from State BJP while five are central BJP leaders which include Sunil Bansal, Amit Malviya. Mangal Pandey, Satish Dhond, and Asha Lakra.
During the meeting with BJP leaders, Mr. Shah urged that the leaders remain prepared to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha election. While leaders like Sukanata Majumdar, Dilip Ghosh, and Locket Chatterjee who are part of the monitoring team are Lok Sabha MPs, leaders like Suvendu Adhikari and Rahul Sinha, who are part of the committees are not Parliamentarians. Four MPs who are Ministers of State in the Narendra Modi-led government – Subhas Sarkar, Nisith Pramanik, Santanu Thakur, and John Barla – have not been included in the election management committee.
The BJP had won 18 Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election and had registered about 40% vote share. Since then the vote share of the BJP had dropped in every successive election and two BJP MPs have since defected to the Trinamool Congress.
Mr. Shah and Mr. Nadda held a meeting with State BJP leaders at a five star hotel in the city’s New Town area and later held discussion with party social media team at National Library in Kolkata. Earlier in the day, the BJP leaders went to a Gurudwara in Kolkata and the city’s famous Kalighat temple.
While addressing the meeting of the West Bengal BJP social media workers at National Library the Home Minister reiterated that the BJP would win over 35 seats in West Bengal in the 2024 election.
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“In West Bengal the BJP’s electoral success hinges on its social media strength. This is because the regional media does not carry our message for fear of Didi [Mamata Banerjee],” Mr. Shah told the gathering.
Urging the party workers to give 35 seats from the land of Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee, he said, “I guarantee that Modi Ji will make Sonar Bangla [Golden Bengal].”
Mr. Shah added that when Ms. Banerjee ousted the communists in Bengal, people were happy and had hoped that conditions in the State would improve.
“But what she gave instead was worse than that.... Forming a BJP government in West Bengal will mean the end of infiltration, cow smuggling, and the citizenship to religiously persecuted people through CAA,” Mr. Shah added.
During his earlier visits to West Bengal also, Mr. Shah had set up a target of 35 Lok Sabha seats in the State. West Bengal elects 42 MPs to the Parliament and the Trinamool Congress, which has registered the highest vote share of 50% in the recently concluded panchayat elections is likely to pose a strong resistance. The BJP had won most of the seats in 2019 Lok Sabha election in north and south west Bengal where the Trinamool Congress has gained considerable ground in 2021 Assembly election.
