By Arun Srivastava
The moves by Amit Shah, the so-called Chanakya of BJP, are no more invincible and his charisma is on the decline. Recent defeats of his party at the by-polls have shaken his confidence. It is perhaps this sense of loss that has prompted his frequent Kolkata visits.
For his brief stay Shah is contemplating to take a small room on rent instead of staying in a hotel or guest house. Though he claims to have taken this decision to reflect the affection shown by the people, the real reason is his keen desire to reach out to the Bengali people. He has come to realise that the non-Bengali voters could not ensure a victory for the party in the state.
If at all the BJP sincerely intends to defeat Mamata Banerjee, he must penetrate the Bengali middle class, the Bhadralok, which, unlike their counterparts in other states, cherishes a progressive view, understood more as communism. His speech at the August 11 Mayo Road rally of the BJP youth wing simply underlines this belief.
This was for the first time he focused on Bengali Hindus and differentiated them from Muslims. But he committed a major blunder. He could not comprehend that non-Bengali Muslims are different from the Bengali Muslims. In his eagerness to accuse Mamata of pursuing the politics of appeasement, he equated Bengali Muslims with Non-Bengali Muslims. In the case of NRC too he followed the same line.
Shah borrowed the phrase “paribortan” (change) of the forces supporting Mamata in her fight against the then CPI(M) government. He called upon his cadres and people to bring change, but could not spell out the nature and character of such change. Pursuing his newly evolved policy of poaching the images of great sons of India, he eulogised Khudiram Bose, great poet Nazrul Islam and other Muslim leaders.
BJP has also been desperately trying to poach the intellectuals, who had given the call for “poriborton” during the Left regime, way back in 2010-11, to consolidate the growing demand of the people for a political change. After 8 years the BJP is experimenting with the same phrase and this time to defeat Mamata, the beneficiary of the earlier call.
Shah has been trying to befriend the dissident left intellectuals and some of them have developed a soft corner for the saffron. He has been consistently visiting Bengal and throwing jibes on Mamata Banerjee and her party but so far has not succeeded in denting her support base.
Paradoxically, the more the BJP intensifies its attack on her, the people of Bengal have been rallying behind her more demonstrably. No doubt a very small section of Bengali Hindus are with BJP, but the maximum number of supporters and cadres are non-Bengali Hindus who did not have access to Congress and CPI(M) in the past or to the TMC now. Most of such supporters are migrants and have their allegiance to their native states.
The BJP might have got the manpower to fight the TMC cadres on the streets but these cadres could not motivate the general voters, the urban middle class. It is Shah’s inability to come to grip with the ground situation, which has impeded the growth of the party in Bengal. He has finally come to realise that simply heaping abuses and throwing jibes at Mamata will not bring victory to party in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He has sought to make a big show of his staying in a small rented house, an elitist ploy to impress the people about his down to earth attitude, but such things do not click with the state’s people. He also alleged that Mamata Banerjee’s government has worsened the condition of Bengal.
But he conveniently forgot that his BJP government had acknowledged that Bengal under Mamata rule has progressed well. After a meeting with the CSO at the initiative of the 15th Finance Commission, state finance minister Amit Mitra had pointed out that when the nation’s GDP increased by 6.7 percent in 2017-18 the state GDP had shown an increase of 9.15 percent during the same period. In the case of industrial growth when the state showed a growth of 16.29 percent, the national figure was a meagre 5.54 percent. In manufacturing sector also, the state recorded a growth of 10.2 percent while the national growth was 5.74 percent.
Shah hopes to bag 22 seats from Bengal in the Lok Sabha, but knows that Mamata with her image of a fighter for the poor’s cause can upset his game plan. She has been emerging as the focal point of opposition unity and has mooted a coalition led by “strongest regional party”, supported by other parties so that there is a one-on-one contest against the BJP everywhere. For her the SP-BSP experiment is a template for the anti-BJP mobilisation.
Ever since Mamata decided to take the BJP head on, Amit Shah has sharpened his attack against her. What provoked Shah most was Mamata’s threat to “capture Delhi” in response to his own slogan of “ebar Bangla (Bengal next)”. Bengal remains the only state where BJP’s ambition for growth has been stunted by lack of political acumen, poor leadership quality and lack of organisational strength. (IPA Service)
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