Union home minister Amit Shah said on Wednesday that if legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray were alive now, he would have made a film on Hirak Rani instead of his iconic film Hirak Rajar Deshe.

“Our Satyajit Ray was a great filmmaker. He made a film called Hirak Rajar Deshe, a famous movie. But when Mamata Didi came to power, Satyajitda was not there. Otherwise, he would have made a movie on Hirak Rani,” said Shah during an election rally in Hooghly’s Mashat on Wednesday.

The 1980 classic, starring Utpal Dutt and Soumitra Chatterjee, is a fantasy film revolving around a king who is an autocrat-megalomaniac crushing his dissenters and tormenting his people.

“This Mamata Banerjee is Hirak Rani. (There is) violence, corruption and appeasement all around.... The Trinamool Congress and the Communists worked to finish nationalism from Bengal. It’s so sad that they did this to Bengal, which gave us Vande Mataram, Jana Gana and also played a key role in the freedom movement,” said Shah, adding that Trinamool and the Communists snatched the rights of the tribals and backward populace and gave them to “infiltrators”.

As the Union home minister used Ray’s reference, Trinamool leadership poked fun at him for invoking the filmmaker without knowing anything about him.

“I doubt whether he (Shah) has ever watched the film Hirak Rajar Deshe.... Some script-writer must have written this and he read it out,” said Trinamool spokesperson Kunal Ghosh.

“He should watch the earlier one in the series, Goopy Gyne, Bagha Byne.... and he would find a lot of similarities between him and the devil characters,” he added.

Many in Trinamool added that had Shah watched the film, he would have found similarities between Hirak Raja and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during whose regime people “are afraid of speaking out the truth”.

BJP insiders, however, argued that the reference to the Ray classic was part of a larger strategy around which the party is building a campaign in Bengal.

“We have made several short films and used Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) comparing the chief minister with Hirak Raja of Satyajit Ray’s film. We described the chief minister as Hirak Rani in these movies.... The Union home minister has carried this campaign forward,” said a state BJP leader.

The mention of a Ray film was also aimed at countering the Trinamool allegation that the BJP has no idea about Bengali culture.

This alleged disconnect of the party and its leaders from Bengal — a point highlighted by Trinamool repeatedly — has often been cited as one of the major reasons for the party’s lower-than-expected performance in Bengal in the 2021 Assembly polls.

As part of its attempt to remove the “outsider” tag, the BJP has been putting forward Bengali leaders like Suvendu Adhikari and Sukanta Majumdar in its Bengal battle against Trinamool, a source said.

“This year, the party (the BJP) has changed many things during its campaigns for the Lok Sabha polls in Bengal.... Other than the PM and the home minister, not many leaders from outside Bengal are coming this time for campaigning. Suvendu (Adhikari) and Sukanta (Majumdar) are leading the campaigns in the state,” said a BJP insider.