THE SHAH WAGON ROLLS IN

Ahead of elections, the BJP’s campaign pitch has taken on a new colour and texture with the home minister’s visit to the state

- Romita Datta

The Battle for Bengal is officially on. On March 1, Union home minister Amit Shah sounded the clarion call at a big rally in central Kolkata, saying a “sonar Bangla (golden Bengal)” awaited the state if the Bharatiya Janata Party was elected to power in 2021. A day later, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee rolled out a massive public outreach programme, ‘Banglar Gorbo Mamata’, while denouncing the communal violence in Delhi as a ‘planned genocide’ and saying the BJP was “applying the Gujarat model across the country”. The ‘goli maro’ slogans heard at the rally—in an eerie reprise of the incendiary sloganeering by BJP leaders in Delhi—and the anti-Shah protests across the city by the Left and the Congress left no doubt that communal faultlines in the state were deepening.

Bengal, of course, is crucial to the BJP’s larger game plan. The party has already made significant inroads in the state, winning 18 of 42 seats—and 40 per cent of the vote share—in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. It’s already nipping at the heels of Mamata’s TMC (Trinamool Congress)—which had only four more seats in LS 2019—and the party fancies its chances of staging an upset victory in 2021.