The Bengal unit of the BJP seems to be taking the “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” advice seriously as the party has started making extra efforts to shed the “outsider” tag that Trinamul Congress leaders are trying to attach the saffron camp.
Multiple sources in the state unit of the BJP this correspondent spoke to said they had realised that the “outsider” tag could be an Achilles Heel for the party in the 2021 Assembly polls.
“You may have seen some attempts to shed the tag already.... There will be more,” said a source.
Last Friday, BJP state president Dilip Ghosh visited the ancestral home of Bengali novelist Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay in Bongaon. A few days ago, he went to the house of Rishi Aurobindo at Chanderagore in Hooghly. “Such stopovers weren’t part of Dilipda’s itinerary before... Now he is trying,” the insider said.
According to this person, the need to project the party’s ability to understand Bengal and Bengali psyche has become extremely important as Trinamul leaders, including chief minister Mamata Banerjee, have made it clear that they would try to pitch the battle for Bengal as a contest between “bohiragato (outsiders)” and “bhoomiputra (sons of the soil)”.
Trinamul’s “outsider” jibe at the BJP intensified after five BJP national leaders — Sunil Deodhar, Vinod Tawde, Vinod Sonkar, Dushyant Gautam and Harish Dwivedi — were given charge to oversee the party’s affairs in Bengal.
BJP sources said Sunil Bansal and Pawan Rana, the general secretaries (organisation) of the party in Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, respectively, were despatched to Calcutta recently and their counterparts from the units in Gujarat and Haryana — Bhikhubhai Dalsaniya and Ravinder Raju — will also join the team, along with Ratnakar, the joint general secretary (organisation) of Bihar.
These leaders — most of whom are known for their election winning abilities — have been given the task of organisational expansion in the party’s five organisational zones in Bengal.
“The BJP is a national party unlike Trinamul and it is natural that national leaders will look after our poll-bound activities,” Dilip Ghosh said at a news conference on Sunday.
However, another leader in the BJP accepted that it was equally important — at least in a state like Bengal — to prove that the party or its leaders were not alien to Bengal or its culture.
Some BJP leaders said while questions on the party’s Bengali credentials could always be swatted away by citing that Syama Prasad Mookerjee was the founder of Jan Sangh, they also admitted that Bengal didn’t produce any leader of national consequence in the saffron camp thereafter.
The dearth of Bngali icons in the saffron camp, however, will not come in the way of the party’s attempts to project its Bengali credentials, said a source.
“The party understands Bengal... See how the top rung of the party, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah, refer to icons of Bengal in almost all of their speeches,” said the source.
In his address to the people of Bengal and his party workers in the state on October 22, Modi named a host of popular Bengali legends. On Sunday, Modi dwelt on Sri Aurobindo in his radio address to the nation.
Another source pointed out that in the recent past, the state unit was publicly promoting leaders like former MLA Samik Bhattacharya and former state president Tathagata Roy — who has also served as the governor of three different states — as spokespersons on various platforms.
“These two leaders are bridging a critical gap... We need people like Samikda and Tathagatada, who speak unadulterated Bengali unlike most of our leaders, in the coming days to counter Trinamul's outsider tag,” this person added.
