BJP is getting stronger by the day in Bengal, the party’s national president Amit Shah said on Wednesday.
Shah who was in Kolkata to attend a organisational meeting said the BJP of 2004 and the BJP of 2016 were qualitatively different in the sense that the saffron outfit had accumulated enough strength to aspire for a bigger role in the State in the coming days.
Shah, who was speaking at a party meeting at the historic Mahajati Sadan, said while in 2011 his party got mere 4 per cent votes and it garnered 10 per cent in the recently-concluded State Assembly elections.
The BJP had for the first time won three seats in the State Assembly.
In the last Assembly it had one MlA - Samik Bhattacharya - who had won in a by-election from Basirhat seat. “Though the party got three seats the workers worked hard. Sincerely working for the party is more important than coming to power,” he said. The BJP president asked the Bengal unit to work for next year’s panchayat elections which will provide the foundation for the 2019 general elections.
Bengal currently has two saffron MlAs—Babul Supriyo from Asansol and SS Ahluwalia from Darjeeling. Both of them are Ministers.
Telling the workers to cheer the fact that the BJP performed well in at least 90 seats in the State, he said, “We got more than 20,000 votes in more than 90 seats which is a good achievement for the party in the given circumstances.”
Claiming that the Narendra Modi Government’s good performance was bound to give results at the hustings, Shah reminded how under various schemes like the Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojna, 60 crore additional bank accounts had been opened in the country.
The BJP president provided “crucial tips” to the local leaders for their future course of action, sources said. Curiously Shah was relatively less critical of the Trinamool Congress which the Congress leaders like Arunabha Ghosh promptly called a “quid pro quo for the support Mamata Banerjee is giving to the GST Bill.”
Meanwhile in an unrelated development a section of the Bengal BJP was planning to launch a movement against the renaming of the State
without much deliberation. Sources in the party
questioned CM Mamata Banerjee’s unanimous decision to rename West Bengal as Bangla or Bongo or Bengal and added the party would take up the issue soon.