Sovan and Partha

Calcutta, March 2: Trinamul has begun a door-to-door campaign to make Mamata Banerjee’s padayatra in Jadavpur tomorrow a success, the drive coming on a day party leaders blamed one another for the lack of crowds at yesterday’s march in the same area.

Trinamul leaders from every corner of Calcutta are visiting households in Jadavpur and Gangulybagan and requesting people to take part in the chief minister’s padayatra.

“Party leaders, workers and sympathisers from across the city will march with Mamatadi from the 8B bus stand in Jadavpur to Gangulybagan. Take it from me, the turnout will surpass Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s padayatra (on Wednesday),” Trinamul state president and MP Subrata Bakshi said.

He said all cabinet ministers, central junior ministers, Trinamul MPs, MLAs and Calcutta councillors will take part.

A Trinamul general secretary said the party was trying to “reach out to as many people as possible and mobilise them for the padayatra”.

Another Trinamul leader said Mamata had asked her close aides to find out the reasons behind yesterday’s “flop show”. “She wants to know why the leaders assigned to mobilise party workers for the event did not do their job properly. Had these leaders been more proactive, workers would have joined the padayatra in large numbers.”

Party insiders blamed miscommunication and lack of co-ordination and initiative for the damp squib. Trinamul sources said industries minister Partha Chatterjee, mayor Sovan Chatterjee and former Behala councillor Anjan Das had been assigned the task of mobilising workers and sympathisers for the event.

A Trinamul MLA said the trio had “not done their bit properly”. “We have no qualms in saying that Parthada, Sovan and Anjan should have taken a more active role in making the padayatra a success, particularly because it was organised a day after Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s jeep show on the same stretch,” he said.

Das gave two reasons why party workers did not turn up in large numbers. “First, I was told about the march after 8pm on Wednesday. I did not get enough time to mobilise people. Second, yesterday being a week day, many party workers had to attend office, so they could not join the march.”

Trinamul youth leader Baiswanar Chatterjee said Bhattacharjee’s jeep show drew a large crowd because “he held such an event for the first time in nine months since losing the seat in the Assembly elections”.

Trinamul leaders in south Calcutta complained that they came to know about yesterday’s padayatra from newspapers. “Nobody informed me about the event. I joined the march after reading about it in the morning papers,” government chief whip Sovandeb Chattopadhayay said.

Trinamul’s south Calcutta president Sacchinanda Banerjee, who is also the chairman of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, said: “I was not informed probably because the organisers thought the padayatra was a local event.”

The Trinamul sources said the “late arrival” of senior ministers such as Subrata Mukherjee, Firhad Hakim and Madan Mitra had not gone down well with a section of the leadership. “Senior leaders such as Subratada, Madan and Bobby (Hakim) turned up at the last moment, when the march was winding up. There is no denying that the event lost much of its sheen because of their absence,” a Trinamul general secretary said.

As many south Calcutta leaders did not attend the event, their supporters, too, stayed away. “We had to ferry truckloads of party activists and supporters from other parts of the city, such as Bowbazar, Burrabazar, Manicktala and Beliaghata in north Calcutta. (Central minister) Sudip Bandyopadhyay supervised this,” a Trinamul leader said.