THE SHAH WAGON ROLLS IN
The Battle for Bengal is officially on. On March 1, Union home minister Amit Shah sounded the clarion call at a big rally in central Kolkata, saying a “ Bangla (golden Bengal)” awaited the state if the Bharatiya Janata Party was elected to power in 2021. A day later, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee rolled out a massive public outreach programme, ‘ Mamata’, while denouncing the communal violence in Delhi as a ‘planned genocide’ and saying the BJP was “applying the Gujarat model across the country”. The ‘ slogans heard at the rally—in an eerie reprise of
