In West Bengal, where Assembly elections are due in a year from now, the prolonged lockdown has seen the emergence of a new political adversary for West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee: the IT cell of the BJP.
In a situation when exchanging barbs and trading allegations may look unbecoming of seasoned leaders — with COVID-19 killing a few dozen people across the country every day — and when political rallies and show of public support look unlikely in the near future, the party has fielded its IT cell to take on the Trinamool Congress chief on social media.
The campaign is led by none other than the man heading the IT cell, Amit Malviya, who, during the past several weeks, has singled out Ms. Banerjee for a relentless attack on Twitter, accusing her of mishandling the pandemic situation in the State.
Backed up by Centre
It was Mr. Malviya who first went national with an issue that was only spoken about in hushed tones within West Bengal: about the alleged underplaying of COVID-19 deaths in the State. The noise made by him resulted in a Central team visiting West Bengal and the State Government eventually conceding — though in not so many words — that many deaths were not included in the COVID-19 tally.
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Mr. Malviya has kept up the tirade ever since, directly attacking Ms. Banerjee regularly under different hashtags: #BengalBurning, #SaveBengal, #BhoyePeyecheMamata (Mamata is scared) and #MamataDahaFail.
The pandemic couldn’t have come at a worse time for Ms Banerjee, who was all set to launch her election campaign when the virus struck. Barely had hoardings declaring her as ‘Bengal’s pride’ sprung up across Kolkata when the lockdown was imposed, rendering all the publicity material useless.
The idea behind the hoardings was to establish a contest between a face and the faceless, considering that the BJP in West Bengal neither has a chief ministerial candidate nor a leader of Ms. Banerjee’s stature. The party’s local leaders, particularly its Bengal president Dilip Ghosh, only end up making outrageous statements while defending their party and attacking their political opponents. Mr. Malviya’s attack, on the other hand, is sharp and savage and has managed to bring West Bengal in the limelight nationally.
Weak counter
Ms. Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, whose social media machinery neither has the network nor the reach of the BJP’s IT cell, is now banking on the popularity of its actors-turned-MPs to return Mr. Malviya’s fire. For example the Twitter timeline of actor-MP Nusrat Jahan, who has close to 74 lakh followers, is, of late, packed with rebuttals of Mr. Malviya’s tweets.
“People of WB will be taken care of by their Chief Minister @MamataOfficial. @amitmalviya you better concentrate of saving your career,” the actor-MP recently tweeted. Another actor-MP Mimi Chakraborty, with some 80 lakh followers, has also taken to rebutting Mr. Malviya, even though most of her tweets are not political.
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Many may like to argue that these bitter exchanges on social media will hardly count in the Assembly elections and that they cannot replace the campaign on the ground level. But the truth is that in the given scenario — with the virus likely to stay a while and social distancing becoming the new normal — the election campaign, particularly in urban areas, could well be confined to social media.
