Why Bolpur: Amit Shah Picks Tagore's Neighbourhood for Roadshow in Bid to Foil TMC's 'Outsider' Taunt

Why Bolpur, many thought when union home minister Amit Shah picked the venue to hold a mega roadshow on December 20.

The answer, not surprisingly, lies in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s preparations for the high-stakes 2021 West Bengal assembly polls in this part of the Rarh region where the BJP failed to make a mark in the two seats of Bolpur and Birbhum in last year’s Lok Sabha elections.

The Rarh region comprises Northern Birbhum, Western Murshidabad, Eastern Burdwan, parts of Hooghly, Howrah, East Midnapore and parts of Bankura district and Jhargram. Recently, central BJP leader Vinod Kumar Sonkar, an MP from Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh, was made in-charge of the Rarh region to assess the ground situation of the party. Sonkar is also the national president for the BJP Scheduled Caste Morcha and chairperson of the parliamentary standing committee on ethics.

So, again, why has Amit Shah picked Bolpur for his 1.5km mega roadshow?

There are two Lok Sabha seats—Bolpur and Birbhum—and 11 assembly seats—Dubrajpur, Seuri, Bolpur, Sainthia, Rampurhat, Muraria, Hansan, Mayureswar, Labpur, Nalhati and Nanur—in Birbhum district. Of the 11, the Trinamool Congress won nine seats, Nanur was secured by the CPI (M) and the Congress won the Hansan seat in the 2016 assembly polls.

However, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, though the BJP did not win either the Bolpur or Birbhum seat, out of the 11 assembly segments in the region, it was leading in five.

The assembly seats in Birbhum where the BJP was ahead of the TMC are Dubrajpur, Seuri, Sainthia, Rampurhat and Mayureswar. While in Dubrajpur the BJP took a lead with nearly 18,000 votes, in the rest of the seats it was ahead by about 15,000, 300, 10,000 and 3,000 votes in the 2019 parliamentary polls.

Also, there are six municipal boards in Birbhum district—Dubrajpur, Seuri, Sainthia, Rampurhat, Bolpur and Nalhati—and in all of these the BJP was leading in the Lok Sabha elections of 2019.

Significantly, the growing influence of the BJP is not only restricted to the assembly seats and municipal boards. There were 19 municipal wards where the party was leading during the general elections. The list includes ward number 15 of TMC Birbhum president Anubrata Mondal. This ward has six booths and the BJP was leading in all of them.

The BJP is concerned about nearly 250 booths in Nalhati (with about 48-50 per cent Muslim population), Hansan (54 per cent Muslims) and Muraria (nearly 70 per cent Muslims) out of the 3,021 booths in Birbhum district. In the remaining booths, its workers are ready to do battle.

According to Election Commission (EC) statistics, though the BJP lost to the TMC in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in Birbhum (Trinamool’s Satabdi Roy defeated BJP’s Dudh Kumar Mondal by 88,917 votes) and Bolpur (TMC’s Asit Kumar Mal defeated BJP’s Ram Prasad Das by 1,06,403 votes), the vote percentage of the saffron party increased significantly to 20.52 per cent in the Birbhum Lok Sabha seat. Similarly, in the Bolpur seat its vote percentage increased to 25.44 per cent.

Compared to this, the TMC’s vote share in the Birbhum and Bolpur Lok Sabha seats fell by 7.32 per cent and 0.48 per cent, respectively.

Noticeably, even in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the TMC’s vote share in Birbhum (despite Satabdi Roy winning the seat) decreased by 11.72 per cent. BJP’s Joy Banerjee was in the third position, but despite that the party’s vote share increased remarkably to 13.85 per cent.

At Bolpur, during the 2014 parliamentary elections, Trinamool Congress’s Anupam Hazra (now in the BJP) defeated CPI(M)’s Dr Ram Chandra Dome by 2,36,109 votes. The BJP’s Kamini Mohan Sarkar was third, though the party’s vote percentage jumped by 8.64 per cent.

Therefore, to add momentum and to turn the increased votes into seats, Shah has strategically decided to pick Bolpur as his next destination to sound the poll bugle with his roadshow and lunch with a Baul singer on December 20.

Also, Bolpur instantly connects with the hearts of millions of Bengalis due to Shantiniketan, a neighbourhood of Bolpur city, which was established by Rabindranath Tagore’s father Maharshi Debendranath Tagore. Later, Rabindranath Tagore founded the Visva-Bharati University here.

Tagore once described the place as: “She is our own, the darling of our hearts. In the shadows of her trees we meet, in the freedom of her open sky. Our dreams are rocked in her arms. Her face is a fresh wonder of love every time we see her, for she is our own, the darling of our hearts.”

So, the Bolpur political events of Shah have three significant reasons. The first one is to make a push for converting increased votes here into seats. Secondly, this is the only Rarh Bangla region where the BJP failed to win Lok Sabha seats in 2019. And thirdly, it will help the saffron party connect with the hearts of Bengalis and shed the ‘outsider’ tag that Trinamool leaders have been trying to pin on it.

The consistent efforts of chief minister Mamata Banerjee to pit her party’s ‘Bangaliana’ (Bengaliness) credentials against the ‘outsider’ BJP didn’t go unnoticed by the saffron party’s central leaders. They felt that in recent years she has been trying to open a new front (apart from the issue of non-Bengali Hindu and Muslim votes) to polarise the Bengali vote to some extent in a bid to derail the BJP’s game plan for the 2021 assembly polls.

On the other hand, Shah in his previous visits has left no stone unturned to project the BJP as a better ‘Bangaliana’ face of Bengal.

After meeting people of various communities, visiting temples, having lunch with commoners and meeting Indian classical vocalist Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty in his previous visit, this time Shah’s carefully crafted Bolpur trip is nothing but an attempt to follow the lines of Tagore, “She is our own, the darling of our hearts”, in a bid to win the emotion and sentiments of Bengalis.

Over the past few months, the TMC has aggressively managed to regain much lost ground in the refugee, border and tribal-dominated areas of Bengal and the BJP is facing challenges with Muslim votes consolidating against it due to resentment among them following the Centre’s indication of plans to implement the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Shah is arriving in Kolkata on December 18 and on 19 and he will chair a series of organisational meetings of the party. On December 20, he will go to Bolpur to meet the officials of the Visva-Bharati University and hold the roadshow. He will return to Delhi the same night.

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