Amit to gauge Bengal BJP's fitness

Shah arrives at Calcutta airport on Sunday. 
Picture by Sanat Kumar Sinha

SANDIP CHOWDHURY, TT, Calcutta, Sept. 10: BJP president Amit Shah will hold a series of meetings with Bengal leaders tomorrow to check their preparedness for the 2019 general elections.

Shah reached Calcutta tonight and is scheduled to hold meetings with the sate leaders between 12noon and 10pm tomorrow at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations on Ho Chi Minh Sarani.

The leaders are busy preparing reports listing achievements on targets set by the central leadership which are expected to come up for scrutiny by Shah who had set the target of ' Ebar Bangla' (This time, Bengal).

"After the tremendous success of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur, the leadership has coined the slogan Ebar Bangla," Shah had said during his visit to Bengal in April.

"Shah will have separate interactions with state BJP functionaries, district presidents, observers and general secretaries, presidents of all frontal organisations (morchas) and convenors of different cells at the state level," a BJP state functionary said.

BJP sources said Shah's stock-taking was primarily aimed at getting the real feel of the party's organisational strength across the state ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

A section of leaders in the state BJP is of the opinion that the national president is "not happy" with the Bengal unit over the poor performance of the Vistarak Yojana, a mass outreach campaign carried out at the booth level across Bengal. Shah was also a part of the campaign during his three-day visit in April.

The official report on Vistarak Yojana says the party could cover a little over 50 per cent of the total 77,000 polling booths in Bengal.

"The target was to establish relations with at least five men at every booth but the achievement was far from the target set by the central leaders," a source in the BJP said.

BJP sources said the party's central leadership had major plans for Bengal but the state unit could not deliver.

"The national leadership is serious about Bengal. Amitji will want to know what the party has achieved. The state leaders are worried over their tomorrow's interactions with Amitji over their performance on the Vistarak Yojana and other organisational initiatives," a senior BJP leader said.

However, BJP's general secretary Sayantan Basu said: "We have done considerably well compared to the BJP's organisational strength in Bengal even in 2014 Lok Sabha polls. We could give polling agents only in 14 per cent of booths during the polls though our vote share was 17 per cent then."

But Basu acknowledged that Shah was "not happy" with the state unit's performance. "Our national leadership has set a target to come to power in Bengal, one of the most politically violent states in the country now. And to meet that target, we need to improve," Basu said.

According to party leaders, when L.K. Advani was the deputy prime minister, he had an hour-long meeting with district BJP presidents in Bengal. And Shah would be the second central leader to interact with district level functionaries over organisational issues.

"Shah will also meet family members of BJP workers who were murdered by Trinamul-backed goons on Tuesday. Victims of the ruling party's vandalism and violence will also meet him," said a senior BJP leader.

"Amitji has expressed his desire to have a direct interaction with the victims and hear from them about the torture they face from Trinamul only to understand the level of political violence in the state," the leader added.

Shah will start his day tomorrow with a visit to Swami Vivekananda's house in north Calcutta to observe the 125th year of his Chicago address.

The national president would also interact with the representatives of the civil society and the media on Tuesday. On Wednesday afternoon, he will speak to city-based industrialists and businessmen at a programme organised by the Merchant Chamber of Commerce (MCC).