BJP moves to blunt TMC’s 'Bangaliyana blitz', Amit Shah to open ‘Op Sindoor’ themed Durga Puja in Kolkata

Kolkata: With the state assembly elections just a few months away, the Bharatiya Janata Party has set its eyes on the Durga Puja festival to blunt the ruling Trinamool Congress’s campaign, which sought to brand the saffron party as anti-Bengali and an ‘outsider’ in West Bengal.

With the festive spirit, which was dampened due to waterlogging caused by overnight downpour on Monday and Tuesday, slowly returning to the City of Joy, Union Home Minister Amit Shah is set to visit Kolkata on Thursday and inaugurate a few Durga Puja pandals, including the one themed on ‘Operation Sindoor’.

The BJP president, J P Nadda, may also visit the city during the Durga Puja. The party’s local leaders, including the state unit chief, Samik Bhattacharya, and the Leader of Opposition in the state assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, will also visit the Durga Puja pandals across the state.

With the next assembly elections in West Bengal just a few weeks away, the ruling TMC has been trying to build a campaign around Bangaliyana or the pride of being Bengali to counter its principal challenger BJP’s Hindutva blitz. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party has been accusing the saffron party’s governments in other states, like Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Odisha, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, as well as the National Capital Territory of Delhi, of harassing the Bengali-speaking migrant workers from West Bengal, branding them as illegal migrants from Bangladesh and, in some cases, even deporting them to the neighbouring country without the due process of law.

The TMC is relying on the ‘Bangla-Birodhi and ‘Bangali-Birodhi’ (anti-Bengal and anti-Bengali) tag that it is trying to fix on the BJP to sail through the next assembly elections. Its campaign, branding the BJP as an ‘outsider’ in West Bengal, had helped it win 215 of the 294 seats in the state assembly in 2021 and retain power. The BJP’s tally, however, had gone up from just three seats in 2016 to 77 in 2021.

Shah’s visit to Kolkata on Thursday to inaugurate the Durga Puja pandals is a part of the BJP’s bid to blunt the TMC’s campaign and win the hearts of the Bengalis during the community’s biggest festival, which had been recognised by UNESCO as one of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021. The most prominent of the Durga Puja he will inaugurate is the one at Santosh Mitra Square in the city. A BJP leader is among the main organisers of this Durga Puja. The pandal has been themed on the Operation Sindoor, the military offensive India had launched on May 7 in response to the April 22 terrorist attacks at Pahalgaon in Jammu and Kashmir. The images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as Wing Commander Vyomika Singh of the Indian Air Force and Colonel Sophiya Qureshi of the Indian Army, who had briefed the media during the Operation Sindoor and thus became the face of India’s military offensive against Pakistan, will be beamed on the pandal.

Shah is likely to inaugurate a couple of other Durga Puja pandals in the city, too. Though most of the committees organising Durga Puja in Kolkata, as well as in other districts of West Bengal, are directly or indirectly controlled by the TMC, the BJP too has reached out to some over the years.

The BJP has also taken a leaf out of the Left Front’s playbook on outreach to people during the festival and asked its units across the state to set up stalls near as many Durga Puja pandals as possible to sell books written by the party’s ideologues and distribute campaign pamphlets.

Mamata, herself, has been inaugurating Durga Puja pandals since Saturday, but took a break on Tuesday, the day most of the city remained under water after a heavy downpour overnight.

“The BJP has no cultural roots in Bengal. They are trying to use Durga Puja for political mileage,” Kunal Ghosh, a senior TMC leader, said.