Union home minister Amit Shah and his party have come up with a promise for the tea population of Bengal that the BJP could not meet in neighbouring Assam where it has been in power for the past five years — a daily wage of Rs 350 for tea workers.
Shah, who released the Sankalpa Patra (election manifesto) of the BJP in Calcutta on Sunday, said that if voted to power, they would hike the wage of tea workers to Rs 350.
Bengal’s tea workers receive Rs 202 a day, after it was revised by the Trinamul government in January.
In Assam, the BJP’s Sarbananda Sonowal government revised tea wages last month to Rs 217 a day except in the Barak valley where it is Rs 195 a day.
“It is surprising that the BJP has claimed to increase the tea wages to Rs 350 in Bengal….We doubt tea workers will believe in a promise that the BJP could not fulfil in a state it rules,” said Alok Chakraborty, a senior tea trade union leader and coordinator of INTTUC, Trinamul workers’ front, in north Bengal.
These past few weeks, the tea wage issue has been raised frequently by political parties in both these poll-bound states that are also India’s top tea producers.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, during his recent trip to Assam, had said that if his party wins in the state, they would increase the daily tea wage to Rs 365, underlining that the BJP could not hike it to Rs 350 despite being in power.
An observer said BJP workers in Bengal’s tea belt will have to face uncomfortable questions now. “People will ask how can they commit to a wage of Rs 350 in Bengal when they could not implement it in Assam,” he said.
The BJP manifesto also said it would look into conferring tribal status to 11 hill communities and the demand of a permanent political solution in the hills would be taken care of.
However, a veteran watcher of hill politics said this was yet another round of hollow promises which the BJP had been making to the hill residents since 2009.
Through the manifesto, the saffron brigade tried to stoke the sentiments of north Bengal residents, a region where the party did well in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, by making a slew of announcements.
Among these include a separate development board for north Bengal, upgrading Bagdogra into an international airport, a training centre for paramilitary forces in the name of Chilla Roy (the fiercest fighter of the Cooch Behar royal family) in Cooch Behar, an IT park in Siliguri, an AIIMS in north Bengal and conferrment of land rights to tea workers and forest dwellers.
Reacting to these, Trinamul leader and state tourism minister Gautam Deb said: “We doubt how many of these would be met…there are seven BJP MPs from north Bengal since 2019. So far, none of them could come up with any major infrastructural project for the region, barring some announcements which we believe are poll sops.”