Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has finally developed an answer to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Maan ki Baat with a didikebolo.com and a mobile phone number through which aggrieved people can access her for redressing their grievances.
Desperate to overhaul the Trinamool Congress organisation and makeover her party’s sagging image post 2019 general elections which saw BJP throwing a serious challenge to the ruling outfit Banerjee apparently in consultations with election strategist Prashant Kishor the Chief Minister on Monday launched the two-pronged measures — phone karo and didi ke bolo (tell didi).
That the TMC Inc was going corporate was driven home by the Chief Minister, who sent out the “modernisation” message, saying, “this is a new TMC a modern party which will reach out to everyone and help them sort out their issues.”
Intriguingly for the media men Bengal’s own Didi — known for delivering extempore on anything under the sun — for the first time in her political career read out from a scribbled text her reach-out plans in which she said, “it is a modernising process for the TMC and our people’s representatives and office bearers will visit 10,000 villages to the booth level…”they will meet party men, ordinary and eminent people … if need be have food with them, stay overnight in their houses and hear out their problems so as to ensure speedy solution.”
The party workers thus visiting the villages will hoist party flag their before they leave for some other place, she said, adding 10,000-plus villages will be covered within a matter of 100 days.
Thus about 2 crore people will be touched in a matter of 20 months before the 2021 Assembly elections, party leaders said not denying posers that the entire episode had been planned by Kishor who planned strategies for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 elections, Nitish Kumar-Laloo Yadav in Bihar and Jaganmohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh.
On the question of whether the party was going to appoint “whole timers” a la the BJP or the Left, Banerjee said TMC was a party of the poor and did not have enough money to appoint whole-timers like the BJP.
“The BJP is a rich party and has huge fund so they can appoint whole-timers. The CPI(M) too has whole-timers but their ways are different. We are not a rich party and so we cannot afford whole timers so as to pay them for their services. So no such worker will be appointed,” she said refusing to answer questions as to why a leader like her who was a master of extempore had to read out her message perhaps for the first time in her life.
Though the Left would not make any comments the BJP leadership immediately made skeptic remarks saying the effort to reach out to the grassroots itself proved that TMC had long lost connect with the people down below.
Senior leader Mukul Roy said, “today’s statements made by the Chief Minister to reach the common people itself proves that she has been asking for votes without popular connect… that her party lad lost popular connect… that they are detached from the people,” wondering why the Chief Minister did not take similar steps a few years ago. “This is all a gimmick,” she said.
Insisting that all the efforts would be futile, BJP strongman and MP Arjun Singh who had just before the elections jettisoned TMC to join the saffron outfit said, “this will all become a futile exercise as no one will believe Mamata Banerjee anymore. She is spending Rs 400 crore to purchase her strategies from a corporate man.”
Another BJP leader said “the people will ask TMC leaders questions: ‘why have you come now, why not earlier?’ They will have to explain why they did not allow people to vote in elections after elections, where is the cash that was earned in various scams?”
