Make no mistake: the BJP is a force to be reckoned with. And Rahul Gandhi is oblivious to this.” Prashant Kishor, a political strategist and Mamata Banerjee’s election counsel, addressed this to a small group of people in Goa on Wednesday.
Interestingly, Kishor was speaking barely a day ahead of Banerjee’s maiden 3-day visit to Goa to lend weight to Trinamool Congress’ ambition of overthrowing the BJP government at the upcoming State polls scheduled next year.
What also seems more than just an accident is that Kishor’s comment was followed up by yet another scathing editorial piece against the Congress party in TMC’s mouthpiece Jago Bangla which accused the former of dragging its feet over taking initiatives for forging the opposition alliance as proposed by the Trinamool supremo to take on the BJP in the 2024 general elections.
“The BJP would remain at the centre of Indian politics. It may win, or it may lose. Like it was for the Congress for the first 40 years, the BJP is going nowhere. Once a party secures over 30 per cent of votes at the national level, that party is not going to go away in a hurry. People should not fall into the trap of believing that Modi would be thrown out because some sections are angry with him. Maybe he would be thrown out, but the party is here to stay and would have to be fought against for many decades,” remarked Kishor at intellectuals meet in the poll-bound state.
“That’s also where the problem with Rahul Gandhi probably lies because he thinks that it is only a matter of time that people will throw them away. But that’s not happening,” emphasised Kishor.
The twin criticism of the Congress — on the party’s top functionary in the first case and on the party as a whole in the later — by a prospective ally, and that too on the eve of Mamata Banerjee’s visit to Goa, where the Congress-led UPA posed the single largest threat to the BJP-led NDA until the last Assembly elections, speaks volumes on the fast-changing political dynamics in Goa.
BJP spokesperson in West Bengal Samik Bhattacharya while maintaining that he doesn’t attach much importance to Prashant Kishor’s comment since the latter is a “non-political entity who confines his analyses while sitting inside air-conditioned chambers”, however, added that Kishor “made an obvious statement in the wake of the popularity the BJP currently enjoys across the nation”.
Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, on the other hand, alleged that he apprehends a “back-channel understanding between the Trinamool and the BJP” and that such remarks by Mamata Banerjee’s political adviser “would only strengthen the hands of the BJP”.
TMC leader Saugata Roy avoided a formal response on behalf of his party stating that Kishor is not a part of the Trinamool Congress and that these were his “personal opinions”.
