In his maiden visit to West Bengal as the new national president of the BJP, Nitin Nabin has significantly selected Asansol and Durgapur, two cities once considered the bastion of the saffron brigade, as is first stop.
Photo:SNS
In his maiden visit to West Bengal as the new national president of the BJP, Nitin Nabin has significantly selected Asansol and Durgapur, two cities once considered the bastion of the saffron brigade, as is first stop. Several important meetings and events are lined up on 27 and 28 January.
Nitin Nabin is reaching Kazi Nazrul Islam Airport (at Andal) from New Delhi on Tuesday and will hold several party meetings in Asansol and Durgapur in West Burdwan district. He will stay in a high-end hotel in Durgapur, where he will preside over the party’s state core committee meetings at which all top leaders will participate to chalk out a strategy for the 2026 Assembly polls.
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The BJP chief will be inaugurating Kamal Mela at Chitralaya Maidan in the evening. In Raniganj, he will preside over another important meeting with the leadership of Asansol District BJP on Wednesday.
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During the 2014 Lok Sabha election, it was the Asansol seat that gave the BJP its first win in South Bengal (the other
seat was won in Darjeeling, mainly due to GJM support). Five years later, the party won the Burdwan–Durgapur
seat too. However, in the 2024 Lok Sabha poll, the BJP lost both these seats, though the results showed it was ahead of the TMC in the rural areas of Asansol and Durgapur.
Since 2023, the ruling party has delayed the Durgapur Municipal Corporation polls reportedly out of fear of losing. In the 2021 Assembly polls, the BJP had won three of the nine seats in West Burdwan – Asansol South , Kulti and Durgapur West.
The BJP karyakartas of “Rahrbanga”, which includes East and West Burdwan, Bankura, Purulia and Birbhum, will participate in his meetings in Asansol and Durgapur. The region is the largest industrial zone of the state and is also cosmopolitan in nature. In Asansol, the non-Bengali speaking population is over 30 per cent and the new BJP national president wants to woo the large non-Bengali vote bank in South Bengal districts, party sources said.
The TMC had roped in two non-Bengali outsiders, Kirti Jha Azad and Shatrughan Sinha, in the 2024 Lok Sabha poll in a bid to secure the vast non-Bengali speaking electorate, who are mainly workers in coal mines, steel plants, thermal power plants and other large industries in the Asansol-Raniganj-Durgapur-Chaittaranjan industrial belt. The move paid rich dividends, as both won.
In 2019, the BJP had won five out of eight Lok Sabha seats in the Rahrbanga region, enabling the party to reach a tally of 18 seats in that year’s poll. Seeing the huge opportunity, the new BJP president Nitin Nabin has a hawk-eye vision on this region. If the saffron brigade wants to win this year’s battle, securing the region would be very crucial.
The Union government is also heavily investing in these areas in the fields of steel plant construction, upgrading railway stations and track expansions, gas pipeline projects, thermal power plant projects, national highway expansion under Bharatmala projects, and so on.
In 2021, the BJP had won only 18 Assembly seats out of the 57 in Rahrbanga, mainly from Bankura, Purulia, West Burdwan districts. “We are excited to meet Nitin Nabin, our national president, at Durgapur and the party karyakartas are very much charged up for his two-day visit to this district,” said Lakshman Ghorui, MLA of Durgapur West.
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