Amit Shah Tells West Bengal BJP not to Expect President’s Rule, Asks them to “Fight TMC Politically”

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, May 8: The West Bengal unit of the BJP is learnt to have received a rude shock from its leader and the union home minister Amit Shah who ended his three-day visit to the eastern state on Sunday asking his party workers not to expect any unconstitutional moves from the Narendra Modi government at the centre to oust the Mamata Banerjee government.

Wrapping up his first visit to the state after the BJP’s demolition at the hands of the Trinamool Congress in the 2021 Assembly elections, he handed down a tough reality check for the party’s floundering unit. The Bengal BJP leaders needed to give up their pipedream of President’s Rule in the state, as well as looking at the CBI to fight its political battles, Shah said.

The state BJP unit has been feeling somewhat orphaned by the central leadership in its fight against the aggressive TMC. Shah’s blunt remarks did not just indicate that Delhi was done with a sympathetic ear, but also a realisation at the top that, as its electoral slide in Bengal accelerates, the BJP needed to go down to the grass-roots to lift itself up, rather than wait for a helping hand from the party government at the centre.

Shah reportedly made the remarks at a meeting with state BJP leaders, including MPs and MLAs. “The Trinamool Congress came back to power for a third straight term after receiving a huge mandate. It has been just a few months since it won the election. Now, an elected government cannot be overthrown by imposing Article 356. We cannot do such things… It is a political fight which needs to be fought politically with the help of our workers,” Shah is learnt to have said.

The BJP is given to frequent calls for President’s Rule in the state, amidst incidents of political violence in the state and a pliant Governor in Jagdeep Dhankhar in Raj Bhavan. Shah did not just discourage the repetitive calls for Article 356 but also for CBI investigation against TMC leaders. The message was that the BJP should play its part of the Opposition, taking the cases or attacks against it as things which will happen.

BJP Bengal spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya said: “Amit Shah made it very clear that our political fight against the TMC government will continue and we will do it politically. For that we have to strengthen the organisation and create booth-level committees across the state. Our workers will be our strength and we will not give an inch of space to the TMC.”

The TMC state general secretary Kunal Ghosh said the BJP appears to have learnt its lesson. “There is a BJP of old-timers and a BJP of newcomers. The two factions are fighting among each other in the state. Amit Shah is making attempts to unite the party. The call for President’s Rule was always a jumla. If they wanted, they could have easily done it as their party is in power and their agent sits in Raj Bhavan. Why didn’t they do it? Because it is not possible to dethrone a political party from power like this. Good sense has finally prevailed.”

After its fantastic 2019 Lok Sabha poll performance in West Bengal with 18 seats, and the commendable Assembly results last year, where it and the TMC mopped up all the constituencies wiping out the Left and Congress, the BJP has been struggling to hold on to both leaders as well as public support. It has not won a single election since the May 2021 results, despite measures such as bringing in young blood by appointing MP Sukanta Majumdar as state unit president. More than on the streets, the BJP has been in the courts filing petitions against the government, or knocking on Dhankhar’s doors.

Not to say that it has been entirely unsuccessful, with the High Court in August last year ordering a CBI inquiry into incidents of crime and murder in days after the poll results, on the BJP’s petition. The Bogtui incident in March, in which eight people were burnt alive in retaliation to the murder of a local TMC leader, putting the ruling party on the back-foot, was also a boost for the BJP.

The CBI is now investigating apart from the above case, a State Level Selection Test recruitment scam, an SSC recruitment scam, the murders of Congress councillor Tapan Kundu and an eyewitness in the case, and the rape and death of a minor in Nadia district.

However, for the central BJP, what has been an eye-opener is that all this is not turning into any poll gains. On April 16, for example, after the Bogtui horror, TMC candidate Shatrughan Sinha had won the Asansol Lok Sabha seat by a margin of over 3 lakh votes, helping the TMC snatch the seat from the BJP. Former BJP-turned-TMC leader Babul Supriyo had won the Ballygunge Assembly bypoll by a huge margin, with the BJP candidate losing his deposit.

The thinking now is that without a strong organisational strength, the BJP cannot hope to defeat the TMC, a party that is firmly entrenched at all levels of the administration in its third straight term in power.

As after West Bengal Shah is embarking on a three-day visit to Assam from Monday, various organisations in the North-East have threatened to resume their agitation against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) of 2019 if the Centre tried to implement it. Apprehension about the implementation of the CAA has arisen after Shah’s remarks in West Bengal on Friday that the CAA would be implemented once the Corona pandemic

In Meghalaya capital Shillong, the Khasi Students’ Union (KSU) said any attempt to implement the CAA would lead to unrest in the State. The Centre, instead, should implement the inner-line permit system in Meghalaya to check the entry of “illegal immigrants.” The inner-line permit is a temporary travel document issued according to an 1873 regulation. This permit requires Indians to possess one while entering four States of the northeast – Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland.

“We will always oppose the CAA, pandemic or no pandemic,” KSU president Lambokstar Marngar told journalists in Shillong. The All Assam Students’ Union and the Raijor Dal, a political party headed by MLA Akhil Gogoi, have also opposed Shah’s comment on the CAA.

Another students’ body, the Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chhatra Parishad, advised the Home Minister to hold a referendum on the CAA before making assertions regarding its implementation. “The BJP got the CAA passed in Parliament because it has the numbers. But popular sentiments are against the Act because it had overlooked the concerns of the indigenous people of the northeast,” the Parishad said in a statement.