Little more than a week after Home Minister Amit Shah’s grand roadshow at Bolpur, Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is all set to take out her own “padyatra” along the same route on Tuesday.
Though the road show is seen as an answer to Shah’s rally the main theme of the of Tuesday’s march have been based on the songs of Poet Laureate Rabindranath Tagore who founded Shantiniketan at Bolpur then a small tribal hamlet.
Several artists from various districts of Bengal will participate in the roadshow and perform Rabindra Sangeet, sources said.
Meanwhile in a related development Banerjee on Monday said that the State Public Works Department (PWD) would take back the control of a road near the Visva Bharati University campus.
The 2.9 km long road connecting two campuses of the centrally controlled university -- Santiniketan and Sriniketan – was handed over to the university in 2017.
The decision was taken after reports that the University authorities had made the road out of bounds for the general public. The Chief Minister who was at Bolpur on Monday said “there are many complaints from local people that they are not being allowed to use the road and it was causing inconvenience. So, the PWD will now take control of it.”
The decision is seen as a part of the ongoing Centre-State (read BJP-TMC conflict in the run up to 2021 Bengal Assembly elections.
Several thousand local residents had earlier written to the Chief Minister about the inconvenience being caused to them by the University’s intermittent act of closing down the road which also runs past the houses of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and painter Nandalal Bose.