BJP national president J.P. Nadda’s proposed meeting at Arambagh in Hooghly district on January 19 has been cancelled because of security reasons, leaving some party leaders disappointed.
However, Nadda’s other meeting at Krishnagar in Nadia district will be held on Thursday as scheduled.
“We had made all plans for the rally. Even the venue was fixed. We would have been happy if the rally hadn’t been cancelled,” said Susanta Bera, the chief of the BJP’s Arambagh organisational district.
Although Bera didn’t express any further disgruntlement, he said it would take a couple of weeks for the rally to be rescheduled.
According to BJP sources, security personnel of Nadda purportedly denied permission for his helicopter to fly after sundown. He will have to board the chopper by 3.30pm, well during the day.
Nadda was supposed to travel from Calcutta airport to Krishnagar first, then to Arambagh and return to the airport in the chopper. BJP sources said the Arambagh meeting was supposed to start before 2pm, and there was no guarantee that the programme would be over by 3.30pm.
It had been decided by the BJP that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah and Nadda would hold multiple rallies in Bengal in the run-up to the 2024 general election. Nadda and Shah are supposed to reach out to 24 Lok Sabha constituencies — 12 each — that the party had lost in 2019.
Shah was supposed to kick-start this campaign with two rallies, one of them in Arambagh, on January 17. But the tour was cancelled after the BJP’s national executive was convened on January 16 and 17.
“This happened twice. First Amitji and now Naddaji. We were told that they would come and hence, we started planning. Then, they cancelled it,” an unhappy BJP worker in Arambagh said.
“Why us? They could’ve cancelled the Krishnagar rally,” he added.
BJP sources said the party considered Arambagh to be an easy Lok Sabha seat. It lost the constituency to the Trinamul Congress in 2019 by a close margin of 1,142 votes. Besides, the BJP won four of the seven Assembly seats in the Arambagh seat in 2021.
But Krishnagar appears to be a tougher bet for the BJP. In 2019, the BJP lost Krishnagar to Trinamul by more than 63,000 votes. In 2021, it lost six of the seven Assembly constituencies in the Krishnagar Lok Sabha segment. “It was a clear choice for us. When resources are limited, we should focus on where it is more needed,” a state BJP office-bearer said about the selection of Krishnagar over Arambagh.
However, the same optimism is not shared by many in the party, especially workers in Arambagh. Many of these workers said the party should not have “overconfidence”.