Vote Bank Soup Kitchen

On a Sunday late in March, the West Bengal unit of the BJP received a message from the party’s high command that each karyakarta—party worker—in the state should adopt five families and look after them during the nationwide lockdown to stop the COVID-19 pandemic. On the same day, around 150 karyakartas came forward to offer their services in Malda district alone. Khagen Murmu, a former CPI(M) legislator and farmer leader, currently a BJP parliamentarian for Malda (North), says the numbers will increase in the coming days. Initially, his team tried to serve cooked food and medicine to the needy. But after consultation with the top brass of the district administration, they decided to stick to dry ration only. But, even before the lockdown began, in areas like Bamangola, Pakuahat, Kendpukur, Gajol and Habibpur (all under Malda-North), BJP workers had started distributing cooked food.

For the BJP, this social service is part of the package that the party is offering to voters of Bengal, which goes to the polls next year; it’s no secret that the party is desperate to add Bengal to its tally of states. And North Bengal is a BJP stronghold, where it won all seven Lok Sabha seats in 2019. The party’s win in Malda (North) was facilitated by the massive leads it managed in some of the areas in the constituency. It had also snatched the Habibpur assembly seat from the CPI(M) in the bypolls. Keeping in tune with their overall supremacy established in Lok Sabha elections in North Bengal, the BJP and its Sangh Parivar allies are paying attention to their new-found political support base. According to Tarun Pandit, one of the RSS secretaries in North Bengal, the Parivar has divided six districts of North Bengal into 11 administrative units where they have deployed 296 swayamsevaks to cater to the need of more than 1,400 beneficiaries. The Sangh has been running Ekol Vidyalays­—schools where a single teacher gives lessons on moral science to 50 students—in many of these areas for quite some time and that makes their task to find workers easier.

However, in Darjeeling, where the BJP has been winning Lok Sabha elections since 2009, there is not much activity from party. In the Darjeeling hills, the Gorkha Territorial Administration authorities has been taking care of supplying ration to the people; a local NGO, Darjeeling Enfielders, is delivering emergency medicines to those in need at discounted rates.

In south Bengal too, the BJP’s activities are visible. BJP activists have distributed dry ration to the poor in the Calcutta neighbourhood of Salt Lake’s AE block. The party’s state vice president Jayprakash Majumdar says they have brought six metric tonne of rice and pulses from Bardhaman and that would be distributed among the needy in Bhangar and Rajarhat, adjacent to Salt Lake. Rantidev Sengupta, who is in charge of all media publications under RSS in the state, says party-affiliated doctors are conducting awareness programmes—holding meetings and explaining how to take correct precautionary steps to evade the coronavirus. They are paying special attention to senior citizens and trying to provide dry ration.

According to Rantidev, their work is effective mostly in Birbhum, Bard-haman, Murshidabad, North and South 24 Parganas in south Bengal.There are allegtions that the Parivar is catering selectively to Hindus and avoiding the Muslims. Doubtful, though. Malda, Murshidabad, Birbhum and North 24 Parganas have significant numbers of Muslims, and the BJP is aware of this vote-base. But for the Parivar, consolidating its support base among Hindus and tribals is high on its list of priorities. In the long run, this could defeat its attempt to expand its mass appeal in the state.

By Rajat Roy in Calcutta