Under big yellow block lettering, a group of men lumber around a shed next to a blue ice cream freezer and orange campaign posters bearing the lotus emblem. Behind them is the exposed engine of a lorry, framed by half-raised yellow shutters and contact numbers. Raw concrete pillars and scaffolding support an unplastered second storey. Below, broad bands of saffron, white, and green cover the ground floor. Small saffron flags hang from the railing, echoing the lotus motif.
In Nehalpur, panic has mounted since the state government announced that people excluded by the SIR wouldn’t be eligible for welfare schemes, including cash doles. “The target is that outsiders and TMC elements cannot infiltrate our ranks and claim to be our workers. It is a mission the BJP has only partly succeeded at. Days after sweeping to power, the party declared it would not allow indiscriminate new membership, an attempt to firewall itself against an avalanche of former Trinamool Congress leaders. Yet on the streets, in auto stands and rickshaw unions, college politics, Durga Puja committees and Bengali cinema unions, men and women have swapped the TMC’s twin flowers for the saffron flag overnight, trying to rule their petty fiefs with the same iron hand. “I didn’t even apply.
“Those who receive the training here will return to their zones and hold mandal-wise camps for booth presidents and other ground level leaders,” said Soumen Patra, a BJP leader from Diamond Harbour. Everyone told me I wouldn’t get it,” said Khatun. “But I am scared of being called Bangladeshi.”
Party society, reborn
Under the weight of expectation after a historic victory, the BJP has charted a careful course, with chief minister Suvendu Adhikari underlining transparency and industrialisation – areas where his predecessor slipped. And in this churn, this has also reshaped what words like Hindu, refugee and citizenship mean for the state. HT takes stock. This is the house of Jahangir Khan , a former strongman of the TMC in Falta’s Srirampur village, around 50km south of Kolkata . The house towers above the modest hutments and one-storey dwellings around it, expanding in fits and bursts – in tandem with Khan’s swelling power over the past decade. Clips of men misbehaving in public while claiming to be BJP leaders now rival, in number, videos of TMC leaders being chased and egged.
But in a state where the party system – under the Left for 34 years, then TMC for 15 – has percolated into everyday life and every arm of government, the party is attempting to assert the supremacy of government instead, 100 days in. Over the past 100 days, the BJP has tried to push Bengal from a party society to what Bhattacharya now calls a command society – a mirror image of Uttar Pradesh: a strongman chief minister, a controversial-but-popular law against organised crime, bulldozer action against alleged encroachers, big-ticket infra projects, and a government moving away from negotiation (what detractors call appeasement) to assert muscular dominance.
“Both Khan and his wife Regina Bibi have been arrested; their two sons have fled and the house is now under lock and key,” said Imtiyaz Ali, a neighbour. “He was just the son of a small local businessman but he had the blessings of the almighty number 2,” said a neighbour, referring to TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee . At Howrah station, porter Rajbir Sahu had hoped his weekly “voluntary” contribution to the union dada would stop. “But he put on a gerua [saffron] cap the next day and said he was always sanatani,” he said. The switches became so galling that BJP lawmaker Jitendra Tewari said publicly that extortion had doubled under the new regime, and state unit chief Samik Bhattacharya twice warned of action against those extorting money using the BJP’s name – admitting his own name was used once. The party and government remain popular; the scars of TMC excess are fresh, though some discontent is bubbling internally over rewarding turncoats and the proliferation of “good” TMC leaders.
