Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Credit: PTI File Photo
Kolkata: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday called for the end of what he called the ‘Maha Jungle Raj’ of the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and accused Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party of opposing the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls of the state for protecting the ‘infiltrators’.
Modi, addressing a rally at Taherpur in Nadia over the phone from Kolkata, urged the people of West Bengal to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the next assembly elections and allow the saffron party to form a “Double Engine Government” (one with the support of the National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre), which would take stern actions against the infiltrators who crossed over from the neighbouring countries. The TMC, on the other hand, hit back at the BJP, accusing it of manufacturing a “hysteria around illegal infiltration”, whereas the information provided by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in Parliament showed that only 18,851 infiltrators from Bangladesh and 1,165 from Myanmar had been arrested across the country during the 10 years since 2014 – the year the Modi Government had taken over – till 2024.
As his chopper could not land at the helipad near the venue of the rally, Modi addressed the people over the phone from the airport in Kolkata. “I appeal to the people of Bengal to give the BJP a chance to form a double-engine government, which would ensure development at double the speed,” said the prime minister, accusing the TMC government in the state of rampant corruption, which stalled the development projects.
“We will end TMC’s ‘Maha Jungle Raj’ in West Bengal, where corruption, nepotism and appeasement politics are ruling the roost,” he said, after starting his address with the “Joy Nitai” slogan, invoking the 15th-century saint of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. He said that the landslide victory of the BJP in Bihar had opened up the avenues for the party to have similar success in West Bengal because “Ganga flows into Bengal from Bihar”.
The venue of the rally was in a region with many assembly constituencies, which have sizeable populations of the Matuas – a community seen by both the BJP and the TMC as a potential vote bank.
The Matuas are a religious sect born out of a reformist movement in the early 19th century and comprising some lower castes, which had then been treated as untouchables by the upper caste Hindus of undivided Bengal. They grew in number in West Bengal, as many of them migrated from the erstwhile East Pakistan after partition and continued to do so even after the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. They now account for 17% of the population of West Bengal and, according to some estimates, can influence the poll results in 40-45 of the total 294 assembly constituencies in the State.
Modi invoked Harichand Thakur, the founder of the sect, in his address on Saturday.
The SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal, however, triggered concerns among the Matuas over the possibility of disenfranchisement.
“I assure every Matua and Namashudra family that we will always serve them. They are not here at the mercy of TMC,” Modi said on Saturday, dismissing the TMC’s allegation that the Election Commission, at the behest of the BJP-led government at the Centre, put the community in peril by launching the SIR of the electoral rolls in the state. “They have the right to live in India with dignity thanks to the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), introduced by our government. We will do even more for the Matua and Namashudra communities once a BJP government takes oath in West Bengal,” the prime minister said, apparently trying to allay the concerns of the community.
“Under the pretext of hunting so-called ‘infiltrators’, the @BJP4India government has instead snatched away the voting rights of the Matuas,” Mamatabala Thakur, a TMC MP and a member of the first family of the community, alleged on Saturday.