Shah seeks a catapult

For Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah, after a successful ‘Mission Assam’ down the banks of the Brahmaputra, it’s time to concentrate all his political acumen and energy on the banks of River Hooghly, so to speak!

During the party’s national executive meet in Odisha in April this year, Shah made his intentions crystal clear: West Bengal, Odisha and Tamil Nadu are now on the party’s radar — states where the saffron brigade has been a relative lightweight to the more entrenched regional entities — namely, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in Bengal, Biju Janata Dal in Odisha and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu.

There is no denying the fact that any rise in communal tension in a state like West Bengal — with a 27.5 per cent Muslim vote, playing a decisive role in 95 of the state’s 294 assembly seats — is likely to see a consolidation of support along religious lines — a key beneficiary of which can be the BJP, as electoral arithmetic across India has proved time and again. The BJP has already emerged as the main opposition force in the state. The challenge for Shah now is to make political inroads into the hinterlands of Bengal, without having to cope with the bugbear of being a communal outfit. This is all the more important since organisationally, at the grass-roots level, the BJP is still in its infancy in the state. That is precisely the reason why Shah has stressed the importance of building up booth-wise teams of dedicated cadres.

Shah needs a catapult. To what extent Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee manages to deny him one is the moot point on which Bengal politics is set to whirl in the foreseeable future.