Abhishek Banerjee on Thursday unveiled his party’s new mass outreach drive called Trinamuley Nabo Jowar (New tide in Trinamul), in which he would travel across Bengal over two months from April 25 and identify its prospective candidates for the forthcoming panchayat elections.

The mega outreach drive by Trinamul’s national general secretary will have two parts. The first would be a Jono Sanjog Yatra (mass outreach march) to connect to people by conducting over 250 public meetings. The second is Gram Banglar Motamot (opinion of rural Bengal), in which he will conduct meetings with 3,000 Trinamul representatives down to the booth level and the people of local influence, who will select the names of candidates for the rural elections through secret-ballot voting.

Abhishek is slated to travel over 3,500km starting from Cooch Behar’s Dinhata on April 25 before it ends at Kakdwip in South 24-Parganas after a rigorous 60-day outdoor drive. He has set a target to meet 30 lakh people directly through the exercise that includes overnight stays.

“The goal of this campaign is to constitute a people’s panchayat. During my public meetings over the past year, I reiterated that panchayat polls would be conducted in a democratic, free, fair, and peaceful manner. With the launch of this campaign on April 25, we are going a step further and taking people’s opinions into account while selecting the candidates,” Abhishek said at a news conference, unveiling the details and the focus of the outreach drive.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had announced the outreach drive on Wednesday.

Abhishek claimed the outreach drive was a first of its kind, in which candidates would be selected through a referendum, instead of the traditional practice of drawing up lists behind closed doors.

“In the Indian political situation, when it comes to deciding candidates for elections across various levels, the decisions are taken behind closed doors through centralisation of power and are based on the recommendations of district and block leadership. For the first time in India, we have set out to take the opinion of the people on candidates for gram panchayats to ensure, in the truest sense, a people’s panchayat,” he said, claiming that the drive’s success would lead other states to follow this practice.

Not vastly unlike the Didi Ke Bolo campaign envisaged by poll consultant Prashant Kishor in 2019, and Didir Suraksha Kawach launched in January this year, the new initiative apparently has the core objective of placating disgruntled sections of the masses and enhancing transparency at the grassroots for the rural elections.

Sources in Trinamul said the drive assumed significance amid murmurs that the party might face some impact from recent allegations of corruption and arrests of its senior leaders and MLAs.

“It is a fresh initiative to rebuild trust among the people for Trinamul. No party turned up earlier to select candidates directly from the ground, which we think would be accepted by the masses,” said a source in Trinamul.

A section of Trinamul leaders said the drive would help Abhishek better understand the pulse of the rural people.