Ananta Maharaj, the BJP Rajya Sabha member, has stirred a hornet’s nest by raising the issue of son-of-soil versus outsider narrative amid the ongoing special intensive revision of the electoral rolls.
“If your name doesn’t appear on the voter list here, your bank accounts will be frozen. You won’t receive any benefits. But who will prove that we are the people of this land? Outsiders?,” Ananta asked from the stage of the traditional Pushna festival of the Rajbanshis held on the banks of the Singimari river at Adabari gram panchayat, Cooch Behar, on Saturday.
The area is located under Dinhata subdivision and falls under the Sitai Assembly constituency, some 55km from Cooch Behar town.
Ananta’s narrative triggered a political firestorm in the district and left BJP embarrassed.
Contacted to comment on Ananta’s remarks, BJP Cooch Behar district president Abhijit Barman said: “The SIR is being conducted according to the Election Commission’s rules.”
Asked for his take on Ananta’s “outsider” remark, Barman declined to say anything more.
Ananta is a top leader of the Greater Cooch Behar Peoples’ Association and one of the prominent faces of the Rajbanshi community’s movement for a separate Greater Cooch Behar state.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he actively campaigned for several BJP candidates in north Bengal, including Nisith Pramanik, the former central minster. His role in gathering crowds for the rallies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah was also remarkable.
In north Bengal, the votes of the Rajbanshi community decide the election results of around half of the 54 Assembly constituencies.
In the previous Assembly poll in 2021, BJP bagged seven out of a total of nine Assembly seats in Cooch Behar district.
Trinamool later won the Dinhata bypoll.
The Rajbangshi population that Ananta belongs to is more than 40 per cent across the district and has played a decisive role in every election so far. Political observers believe that the BJP made Ananta a Rajya Sabha member to woo Rajbanshi votes.
Trinamool also sought to court him in the past, with chief minister Mamata Banerjee meeting him.
Political observers of the region also believe that Ananta chose the traditional Pushna festival of Rajbanshi culture as a platform for this public connect to increase his political leverage before the Assembly elections.
The leader has in the past used this festival, which is essentially a community picnic, as a tool for political messaging.
District Trinamool leaders were also cautious about commenting on Ananta’s remarks.
“Whatever the the Rajya Sabha member has commented is for him to describe its meaning. We have nothing to comment on this issue at the moment,” Jagadish Chandra Barma Basunia, the Trinamool Congress MP of Cooch Behar and a resident of Sitai, said.