Mamata Banerjee is expected to conduct an event in Singur on January 28 as a countermeasure to Narendra Modi’s Sunday rally on the land that the Tatas had once acquired for the Nano car factory.

The Bengal chief minister, according to sources in the Trinamool Congress, may conduct an administrative programme and a rally in Singur, but the details are yet to be finalised.

“She has given a go-ahead for January 28 at Singur; the rest is being figured out. There could be a state government programme for distributing benefits, especially the release of a tranche for the Banglar Bari scheme. There might be an administrative review meeting, too. With or without a political rally, a political speech is a certainty,” said a source.

Asked if that was with the principal objective of countering the Prime Minister’s Sunday rally at the venue of symbolic significance, he said: “Obviously.”

A senior on the Treasury benches of the Assembly said, though Modi’s Singur appearance turned out to be a “damp squib” that saddened many even in the BJP, Mamata was unwilling to allow room for complacency, and would leave no stone unturned to blunt every thrust of the saffron camp this election
season.

He said even Trinamool found Modi’s “silence” on industry and private investment at the Singur rally surprising and agreed that it made Mamata’s counteroffensive assignment easier.

“But she is not going to take it easy, certainly not amid the contentious SIR in poll-bound Bengal by the BJP’s Nirjaton (persecution — wordplay on nirbachon, which means election) Commission under Vanish (Gyanesh) Kumar,” he said, adding that the Hooghly Trinamool leadership had been requesting the top tiers of Trinamool to have a counter-event by Mamata or her nephew Abhishek Banerjee before the end
of January.

Singur is profoundly emblematic for the Trinamool chairperson, as her anti-land acquisition movement there against the Left Front regime’s push for a Tata Motors factory — relocated eventually to Gujarat’s Sanand, when Modi was the chief minister — was instrumental in propelling her to power in 2011.

Nearly a thousand acres of the abandoned factory land remain uncultivated in the Hooghly pocket, despite Mamata’s tokenism of mustard-sowing there a decade ago, and despite her promises for Singur since her landmark Supreme Court victory of 2016, when the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government’s acquisition of agricultural land for the Nano project, declaring the move illegal.

The BJP’s state unit chief Samik Bhattacharya responded derisively.
“She had sown mustard seeds in 2016. In 2026, she might plant some tuberose saplings. What else,” he said, tongue firmly in cheek.