KOLKATA: Union Home Minister Amit Shah will visit West Bengal from tonight to charge up the BJP’s organisational machinery ahead of the Assembly elections in the state, scheduled for April–May next year.
The home minister is expected to arrive at the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport tonight and will remain in the state for three days. During his visit, he is slated to attend a series of organisational meetings with the BJP’s Bengal leadership unit in phases.
After landing at the airport, the Home Minister will head straight to the BJP office in Salt Lake, where he will review the party’s organisational preparedness for the Assembly elections, according to sources in the saffron camp.
Sources further said, "We had a plan to organise a rally where Amitji would be requested to address the crowd but he prefers to hold organisational meetings with our party leadership, including our MPs, MLAs and others during his stay for three days till Wednesday."
"He wants to focus on our party’s organisational set-ups this time in the wake of assembly polls scheduled in the state after few months. He may also be interested in getting some important inputs at the backdrop against when the state is reeling under the Special Intensive Revisions (SIR) of electoral rolls exercise since 4 November," a source said, requesting anonymity.
Apart from the SIR issue, another significant concern is the Matua community, whose names have reportedly been excluded from voters’ lists in districts such as Nadia and North 24 Parganas -- two key BJP strongholds -- following the first phase of the ongoing electoral roll revisions.
On Wednesday, unprecedented violence between two rival Matua groups, aligned with BJP MP and Union Minister of Shipping Shantanu Thakur and Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP Mamatabala Thakur, rocked Thakurnagar, the administrative headquarters of the Matua community. The unrest followed the deletion of nearly one lakh Matua voters from the electoral rolls.
The violence was triggered after a comment made by Shantanu, the BJP MP from Bongaon constituency in North 24 Parganas, last Monday night, stating that the names of nearly one lakh Matuas could be excluded from the draft electoral rolls and that "sacrifice" was necessary to disenfranchise 50 lakh Muslims. The remark fuelled fresh anxiety within the Matua community and intensified political confrontation in Bengal ahead of the Assembly elections scheduled next year.
Several hundred Matuas belonging to the Mamatabala group took out a protest procession and marched to the Union Minister’s residence in Thakurnagar, demanding clarification over the comment.
"Deletions of such a huge number of Matua voters ahead of the assembly polls appear to be a bone of contentions to the BJP who had enjoyed a phenomenal rise with Matua vote banks since 2019 Lok Sabha elections when the party had bagged 18 seats from Bengal. That’s why, Matua issue must be there as one of the prime agendas in Amit Shah’s meetings with his party leaders," a political analyst said.