With the Calcutta High court playing spoilsport, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cancelled his December 16 trip to West Bengal and is all set to head to Uttar Pradesh instead. State BJP officials confirmed the change of plan.
The prime minister was supposed to address a rally in Siliguri in North Bengal and to start his election campaign in Bengal by attending four other rallies in different parts of the state. But the plans were changed after the Calcutta High Court withheld permission for the rathyatra. The election debacle that the BJP faced in the three major states in the Hindi heartland too contributed to the change of plans.
The BJP state vice president said, "We have been asked to iron out the matter related to the rathyatra, and if everything goes well, the prime minister would inaugurate it." Sources in the BJP said that Modi would rush to UP and would begin his election campaigning for 2019 and visit Rae Bareli and Allahabad. With plans to protect its turf, the leadership will chalk out fresh tactics at the parliamentary party meetings beginning today.
A senior BJP leader said that the party is more worried about the perception of the party and central government instead of reality. "If you observe, you would realise that apart from Chhattisgarh, we did fairly well in this election despite anti-incumbency and could have won the two states (Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh) if luck could have it. But we accepted defeat as the party had set a huge target before the election which we have been unable to meet. We did not say, like Congress after Gujarat election said, that it was win in the defeat for us. Our party president categorically told us not to do that," said the senior BJP leader.
Meanwhile, Calcutta High Court has extended the deadline for the West Bengal government to give the BJP delegation till Saturday to iron out how BJP's rath yatra program would pan out across the state. The BJP had decided to send Mukul Roy and party vice president Jayprakash Majumder. West Bengal government told the high court that it's senior officers would not meet the BJP delegation if it included people with criminal records. At this, Justice Biswanath Sammader asked which politician in the country did not criminal record. The court then asked the government to give a declaration that the chief secretary, home secretary and director general of police do not have any case against them.
The battle is expected to go on in the court as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee would do her best to block BJP's run in Bengal.
