The Bengal unit of the BJP has drawn up a strategy to claim credit for a slew of projects that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to launch during his visit to the state on Friday.

A social media campaign has already begun with an e-poster of Modi and a message in Bengali, which reads: “Ami ashchhi Poschimbawngey (I am coming to West Bengal).”

The e-poster — shared by the official Twitter handle of the state BJP unit — has an image of the Vande Bharat Express that Modi is slated to flag off at the Howrah station on Friday. The train would be the first of its kind in Bengal and shall run between Howrah and New Jalpaiguri.

During his visit, Modi is scheduled to inaugurate a few other railway projects and lay the foundation stones of the Namami Gange projects and those of the department of drinking water and sanitation.

It has been decided that the route Modi will take from the Royal Calcutta Turf Club — where he will arrive in a helicopter from the Calcutta airport — to the Howrah station would be covered with his cutouts. Alongside Modi, three foremost leaders of the BJP in the state would feature in the publicity material.

“Along with the Prime Minister’s cutouts, we will put up cutouts of our state president Sukanta Majumdar, leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and national vice-president Dilip Ghosh,” said BJP state secretary Umesh Rai, who is part of a three-member committee set up by the BJP to oversee this campaign. Pursurah MLA Biman Ghosh and state vice-president Sanjay Singh are the other members of the committee.

While it has been fairly customary for political parties to flood the routes with cutouts and posters of their most important leader during their visits, putting up cutouts of the three state BJP leaders betrays the saffron camp’s desperation to wring political dividends out of an event organised by the Centre.

Rai said Adhikari, Majumdar and Ghosh had been invited to the event at the Howrah station and that was why their cutouts were being arranged for. That justification hasn’t, however, gone down well with sections within the BJP.

“Modiji is our supreme leader and nobody else can be likened to him. The cutouts of our state leaders are a ridiculous idea during a prime ministerial visit. None of these three leaders is part of the central government, which has organised the event,” said a state BJP functionary.

“Our leaders have failed to win even one civic election or an Assembly bypoll since we were trounced in 2021. The party is plagued with factional feuds. Our workers remain unwilling to come out of their comfort zones. Yet, our leaders remain obsessed with such futile publicity,” he added.

Sources said presidents of several organisational districts of the BJP had been asked to put up posters in their respective areas, thanking Modi for the train. Some of the posters are likely to contain images of the corresponding district chiefs, in yet another attempt to project state leaders in the garb of thanking the Prime Minister.

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