Buoyed by its electoral gains in the Jangipur Lok Sabha bypoll, the Bharatiya Janata Party is going to mount its show of strength in Kolkata on November 30. The party will organise a rally at Rani Rashmoni Road (city centre), which the state BJP president Rahul Sinha claimed would attract a record turnout.
“Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj will be the star speaker of this rally. From this rally, the BJP will kickstart its campaign for the coming panchayat election in the state. We are going to target both the Congress government at the Centre and the Mamata Banerjee government in the state for their misrule,” Mr Sinha added.
BJP workers are going all out to make the proposed rally a major success. “The puja festivities will come to an end with the celebration of Lakshmi Puja on October 29. Thereafter, BJP workers will organise small meetings in every block across the state to mobilise support for the rally,” Mr Sinha added.
The central leadership of the party was pleasantly surprised at the performance of the BJP in the Jangipur bypoll. No one expected BJP to win but no one expected it to do so well either. Congress candidate Abhijit Mukherjee had to struggle to win the election by a wafer-thin margin of 2,500 votes.
“The BJP candidate Sudhangshu Biswas bagged above 85,000 votes. Our vote share jumped from a measly 2.4 per cent in the 2009 Lok Sabha poll to nearly 11 per cent. It was way back in 1991 when the BJP was riding the Hindutva wave that it had notched 11 per cent vote. Our Delhi leadership is understandably happy at the party’s turnaround 20 years later,” he added.
Mr Sinha reiterated his stand that the rise in BJP’s vote share reflected the serious search for a political alternative by the people of Bengal. “The people had voted Mamata Banerjee to power with great expectations but she has belied them all in barely 15 months. Now the people are as disenchanted with Trinamul Congress as they are with the CPI(M). They are also extremely angry with the Congress which is mired in corruption. They are therefore increasingly turning to the BJP,” he added.
Meanwhile, in order to take the message of the BJP to more and more people, book stalls have been set up outside many puja pandals. “In these stalls, we had displayed books, booklets and other literature which will give people a clear picture of BJP’s ideology, programmes and policies,” Mr Sinha said.