CALCUTTA, February 27: The Bharatiya Janata party's timely tie-up with Mamata Banerjee's Trinamul Congress promises to buoy its chances for the 1998 polls in the CPM bastion of West Bengal.The party stands to grab a major portion of the anti-CPM votes that should take its vote percentage up in the state from an utterly unflattering 6 per cent in 1996; which again was a come-down from the earlier 11.7 pc in 1991. And, as added bonus even get more than one seat which will be the BJP's starting gun in making itself a place among the bhadralok.
As one senior State BJP leader said, ``If we must trust the popular response our election campaigns have been eliciting, we hope to spring quite a few surprises in all the 14 Lok Sabha seats we are contesting this time.''
And party leaders claim their appeal this time has cut across the rural and urban divide, blotching up the CPM-sponsored myth that the party appeals to a handful of the affluent urban population.
``The issue of a stable Government at the Centreseems to have clicked in West Bengal too, cutting across the urban and rural poor, or middle-class or rich,'' says veteran leader and former chief of the State unit Vishnukant Shastri.
``People here appear conscious of the fact that the Left Front, with a total of 64 LS seats -- 42 in Bengal, two in Tripura and 20 in Kerala -- at its disposal cannot contribute to a stable Government at the Centre,'' Shastri quipped.
Coming to issues of more local nature, BJP State vice-president Paresh Dutta said: ``Our promise that we will provide a performing government has certainly helped us gain ground with the educated poor, including the middle class and agrarian population.''
Another major issue which seemed to have made headway with the rural population, particularly in the areas abutting Bangladesh, is the ``continuous infiltration of the Bangladeshis, a perennial source of trouble for the people in these areas,'' Dutta said.
And this is precisely why the seat adjustment between the Trinamul Congress andthe State BJP was worked out in such a way that ``most of the sensitive border constituencies are left to us,'' he noted.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
