Green flag for Bengal!

PM Narendra Modi will be in Kolkata for the flagging off of the Vande-Bharat Train between Howrah and New Jalpaiguri and the Metro Joka-Taratolla line. Interestingly, there is mellowness from the ruling Trinamool party concerning Modi, while its sharpened knives were in a usual attack mode on BJP and RSS. Mamata’s famous election rhetoric of dragging Modi by a rope tied on his waist, or that she shall share a platform only with a new Prime Minister, have no doubt, hurt Bengal, which the CM seems to have realised now.

However, mood change to suit her short-term political gains is familiar to the TMC supremo. The Panchayat elections are not far away, and the ruling Trinamool seems to be on the defensive over the Prime Minister’s Awas Yojana scheme, with many party leaders turning out to be undue beneficiaries despite being ineligible. The investigating agencies have also found holes in the spending of MNREGA money and have tightened the screw by online attendance to the beneficiaries.

Meanwhile, Abhishek Banerjee, the youth icon and the party’s number two, had warned a few Trinamool village panchayat leaders, demanding their resignations. Some influential but corrupt leaders have been promptly arrested by the police, acting in alacrity over Banerjee’s charges. It may be recalled that the investigating agencies chased Abhishek Banerjee and his family over several allegations of being beneficiaries in the sand, coal and cow smuggling. But, at least for now, the charges have cooled down, giving rise to the oft-repeated charge that the Central government is using investigative agencies to suit their political goals.

Amid these, another piece of news has caught the attention of all. The abrupt cancellation of Arijit Singh. The detractors claim that the singer humming the lines from his hit song “Rang De Tu Mohe Gerua,” translated as ‘give me the colour saffron’ might have been, at best, a classic case of error of judgement of time and place. Senior TMC Minister and the Mayor of Kolkata has clarified that the organisers have not taken permission from the authorities, and the show would have clashed with an important G20 summit and thus could not be risked.

The cancellation of the much-hyped and much-expected show is no different than a case of a huge skyscraper built before the authorities realised that it was illegal, and the court ordered its razing. All forget that prevention is better than cure.

BTW, saffron affects different people differently. For example, the Hindutva zealots do not like saffron to be the colour of bikinis, whereas the utterance of the word saffron seems to upset the secularists.

The spokesperson of the ruling party who loves whiplashing Centre, Suvendu Adhikari, and everything to do with Modi seems lost, with the new axis of twist in State politics. The BJP claims that it will win 24 seats in the 2024 elections in West Bengal.

Let’s wait for Modi to return for our serial to resume.

Sampath Kumar

Intrépide Voix