Having suffered reverses in the recently concluded general elections at the hands of the fast growing BJP in the State, the Trinamool Congress is planning to rope in political strategist Prashant Kishore to help it win the 2021 Assembly elections.
TMC sources said the Chief Minister on Thursday invited Kishore at her State Secretariat office at Nabanna. The duo held a closed door meeting for about two hours. Mamata Banerjee’s nephew and MP Abhishek Banerjee too was present in the meeting, sources said.
Mamata reportedly asked Kishore to help her party win the State elections in 2021. Kishore’s likely entry in Bengal’s electoral scene comes in the wake of a meteoric rise of the BJP which clinched 18 out of 42 seats in the Lok Sabha polls. The TMC won 22 and the Congress got 2 seats.
In the Lok Sabha polls, the TMC and BJP got 44 and 40 per cent votes respectively pushing the Left down to about 8 per cent.
According to sources, Kishore, who was instrumental in planning Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election campaign in 2014 besides strategising YSR Congress leader Jagan Mohan Reddy’s remarkable victory in Andhra Pradesh, would start working for the Trinamool from July or August.
Though both sides remained tight-lipped about the latest developments, inside sources said Kishore a senior JD(U) leader was likely to work for the TMC as a professional.
Meanwhile “you have not won the State polls. In the national elections you have got only 18 seats and we have won 22 --- that too by manipulating the elections.” Still why will you kill political opponents by bringing in supari killers. This is not expected in Bengal politics,” Mamata on Thursday said emerging from the House of a TMC supporter who was allegedly bumped off by local BJP people last week.
“We also won 26 seats in 2009 elections did not resort to such violence. Today after winning some seats, the BJP has unleashed a naked dance of death in Bengal,” she maintained.