New Delhi: Following Union Home Minister and former BJP president Amit Shah’s visit to Bengal ahead of the 2021 Assembly elections in the state, the BJP has been tasked to woo the “intellectual community” which had traditionally been with the CPM and is currently believed to be with the Trinamool Congress.
For this, the party has chosen the newly appointed national secretary, Anupam Hazra, to lead this project of the party under “Mission Bengal”. Anupam Hazra, who had a 37-minute long meeting with the BJP’s national organisational secretary B.L. Santosh—who also accompanied Amit Shah to Bengal in his two-day visit earlier this week—presented a blue print of the plan to Santosh which includes holding multiple symposiums with doctors, lawyers, professors, musicians, singers, among such other artistes, apart from holding meetings and discussions and engaging with people through traditional folk music and dance.
Anupam Hazra told The Sunday Guardian that he has been tasked with the work of attracting non-political intellectual people in a non-political way. “I have had a long meeting with hon’ble B.L Sasntoshji; I have presented him with a plan through which we can reach out to the intellectual community of Bengal. You know that Bengal has always been very rich culturally and we want to showcase to them the good work and vision of the BJP for Bengal. Bengal for all these years has lost its glory and what we want to showcase to them is how the BJP can bring back the lost glory of Bengal,” Anupam Hazra said.
According to the plan, the party is going to host multiple symposiums with people from different walks of life across Bengal. These symposiums would be held with doctors, professors, lawyers, poets, writers, cultural artistes, singers, musicians, among others, in different parts of the state where the BJP would showcase the good work of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the vision BJP has for developing Bengal and engage with the “intellectual community” to increase the acceptability of the party among the masses.
Hazra also said that he has also floated the idea of engaging Baul artistes (folk Bengali song artistes) to reach out to the common people through folk music and according to him the idea was appreciated by Santosh. “I have presented an idea about how Baul songs can directly connect with the people of Bengal and we are working on creating themes on which these songs would be written and presented to the people of Bengal. The songs would revolve around various themes on the good governance of the BJP. Some of the themes which are likely to be a part of the series of such songs are themes like schemes for rural and urban development, six years of Modi government, among many others,” Hazra said.