 "BJP's Bengal strategy: Bangladeshi immigrants, not Muslims are the enemy")
The local unit had invited television crews, to publicise the event. Singh, in full view of the journalists, asked the youths whether they had been instructed to don skull caps for that event.
That stunned the party unit. However, Singh was laying down the party strategy specific to Bengal. Muslims comprise 25-30 per cent of its voters and 42 per cent in 140 of 341 development blocks. Singh, a grandson of former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, asked the youths not to put on skull caps if they didn’t wish to.
“We are not concerned with the religious affiliation of our workers and supporters. The issue in Bengal is of Bangladeshi ghuspathiye (infiltrators) — the threat they pose to the peace and stability of the state and how they impact the socio-economic security of all its residents,” a party’s senior leader said.
Ghuspathiye, literally infiltrators, is the term BJP uses to describe illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.
It is a political line that BJP President Amit Shah pursued at his rally in Kolkata on Sunday. Shah accused Mamata Banerjee-led Bengal government of protecting these immigrants.
He also alleged that money from Saradha chit fund scam funded the Burdwan bomb blasts, suspected to be the handiwork of “infiltrators” from Bangladesh. “It is the people of West Bengal that have elected you (Banerjee) CM, not the infiltrators from Bangladesh. Stop protecting them,” he said.
“The Bengali Muslim is as much a nationalist as any Bengali,” is now a catchphrase with party leaders there.
The BJP’s Bengal strategists argue the Sachar committee report showed how a majority of Bengali Muslims lived in extreme poverty. They contend that goons, mostly from among the “infiltrators”, with support from religious outfits across the border, are the chief exploiters of the common Bengali, whether Hindus or Muslims.
BJP leaders also claim these “goons” are the source of TMC’s influence in the rural hinterland, as they were for the CPI (M) earlier.
The party strategists say the rising numbers of Muslims joining the party in recent months, in the hope of finding protection, corroborated their analysis.
The claim is that the number of Muslims joining the party has doubled since the Lok Sabha elections.
The victory of the BJP candidate from Dakshin Basirhat in the recent Assembly by-polls is seen as a further proof that Muslims support the party —Basirhat is near the Bangladesh border.
The party is confident of doing better than its Lok Sabha election success — it received an unprecedented 17 per cent vote — in the coming civic body polls and the 2016 assembly elections.
Its previous best was 12 per cent of votes in 1991, on the strength of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
However, few within the party had expected such a stark change in its fortunes until a year before. “Signs that people wanted BJP to play a effective role in the state politics were there but we didn’t acknowledge these,” a leader said.
He recounted an incident from April 2013, when a district unit wanted to gift then BJP’s prime ministerial candidate (and Gujarat chief minister) Narendra Modi a statue of Vivekananda during his visit to Kolkata.
“We wanted a sculpture from the Krishnanagar area of Nadia, famous for its pink-hued clay statues,” he said. The cost of the statue, at Rs 25,000, was somewhat beyond the budget of the local unit.
“The Muslim sculptor, when told it was a gift for Modi, reduced the price substantially and requested my worker that Modi should do something about Bangladeshi infiltrators,” the leader said, adding most people in the state know that the BJP is the only party that can address the issue.
However, the Bengal unit continued to play it safe. Modi, during his February rally in Kolkata, didn’t attack the Bengal CM or her party for its “appeasement” of “infiltrators”.
However, that changed by mid-April. In one of her election speeches, Banerjee said her government treated people from Rajasthan and Bihar as “guests” in her state, as they’d lived there for over a hundred years. “Then what are Bangladeshi infiltrators?” retorted Singh in a press statement that went viral.
A few days later, Singh and Bengal BJP leader Rahul Sinha accompanied Modi in the car when he landed for a rally at Srirampur.
The two convinced him that he shouldn’t pull his punches on Banerjee. Modi spoke about the Saradha scam, how its chairman bought a painting by Banerjee for Rs 1.8 crore and her government’s “appeasement” policy for 55 minutes.
“Modi ji was convinced when minutes after the rally, the owner of a Kolkata-based media house phoned to congratulate him for capturing the mood of Bengal,” the BJP insider said.
Modi had planned three public rallies in Bengal but eventually addressed eight. The BJP says it has, since the Lok Sabha elections, re-settled 5,500 Hindu refugees from Bangladesh in Madhya Pradesh, identified “infiltrators” in Basirhat and other border areas and reached out to the sizable dalit population of the state.
Its swelling ranks have also meant its workers are standing up to what the leadership calls intimidation by TMC workers.