Union home minister Amit Shah will visit places associated with Bengal’s three leading icons — Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda and Khudiram Bose — during his two-day visit to the state in a bid to establish the saffron camp’s connect with Bengali culture and tradition while countering the Trinamul Congress’s concerted effort to label the BJP as a party of “outsiders”.
“Amitji will visit the ancestral house of Swami Vivekananda in Calcutta and Khudiram Bose in Midnapore on December 19. On December 20, he will visit Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University in Bolpur’s Santiniketan,” a state BJP leader said.
Shah, who has decided to lead the electoral fight in Bengal almost as a personal project, doesn’t want to give Trinamul any room for criticism when it comes to establishing the BJP’s Bengali credentials. Hence, the decision to pay tribute to the three icons is part of a well thought-out strategy, the BJP leader said.
According to Shah’s official itinerary, he will spend 30 minutes each at the residences of Swami Vivekananda and Khudiram Bose. However, at Santiniketan — where he will pay floral tributes to a chair once used by Tagore in Visva-Bharati — Shah will participate in a series of programmes spanning over an hour and 45 minutes.
Sources in the BJP said senior leaders had realised “one cannot be enough Bengali, if that person doesn’t connect with Tagore”, and that was why Shah would spend almost two hours on the varsity campus.
“Recently, our social media cell made a faux pas when they tweeted that Tagore was born at Visva-Bharati and had attributed it to our national president J.P. Nadda. Trinamul made a major issue of it,” a member of the party’s youth wing pointed out.
“We believe Amitji’s Visva-Bharati tour will undo the damage,” the BJP’s youth wing leader added.
A university official said Shah would also meet vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakraborty during his visit to Santiniketan.
A section in the BJP said while attending a road-show in Santiniketan, Shah was likely to address the issue of rampage on the varsity campus over the building of a boundary wall to fence the Pous Mela ground on August 17. The under-construction wall was pulled down and university property bulldozed by a mob led by Trinamul’s Dubrajpur legislator Naresh Bauri.
“The visit of Amitji is important as Trinamul-backed goons had vandalised the gate of the university and ransacked the campus. The incident had exposed Trinamul’s attitude towards Rabindranath Tagore, while they were trying to establish the BJP as an anti-Bengali party,” said former MP and BJP leader Anupam Hazra.
During his upcoming visit, Shah will continue with his lunch politics and is scheduled to have food at the residences of two marginal families. In Midnapore, he will have lunch at a farmer’s home at Belijuri village, while in Birbhum, he will sit down for food with a family of minstrels (bauls) in Santiniketan.
Shah is also scheduled to visit multiple temples during his tour and hold meetings with senior members of the state BJP leadership.
In the aftermath of the December 10 “attack” on Nadda’s convoy during his visit to Diamond Harbour, BJP leaders want Shah’s two-day trip to pass off peacefully. A BJP leader said that “volunteers” — at least a thousand each for Midnapore and Bolpur — would be deployed along the road that Shah would take in both the places.
“We can’t take risks after what happened to our national president J.P. Nadda’s convoy at Diamond Harbour,” said Samit Kumar Das, the party’s chief for West Midnapore district.
He added that the volunteers would stand amongst the crowd to ensure that Shah’s convoy covered the route without a hitch.
