West Bengal Assembly polls | CM Mamata Banerjee's balancing act to woo Hindi-speaking voters

With the Assembly elections round the corner and the rise of BJP in West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee seems to be wooing the Hindi-speaking voters of the state.

The move indicates that she is keen on eating into BJP’s support base among these voters, a section of whom have been traditionally supporting the saffron party.

The fact that Mamata’s outreach to the Hindi-speaking population comes at a time when she is raising her “outsider” pitch against the BJP.

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This move indicates that it's a balancing act aimed at assuring the Hindi speaking voters that the 'outsider' tag is not meant for them but for the BJP.

This became evident as Mamata for the first time invited members of communities who speak Hindi or other regional languages at the TMC headquarters in January.

She urged the community members who are from states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan to vote for the Trinamool Congress (TMC). She also appealed to them to campaign against the BJP ahead of the Assembly elections.

The Chief Minister told the community members that she had always accepted people who speak Hindi and other languages. “I want you to vote for me more than Bengali-speaking people do,” said Mamata.

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TMC government had announced several projects for the Hindi speaking population in the state such as a Hindi University. The TMC had also revamped its Hindi cell.

Hindi speaking voters play a key role in several regions of the Bengal. For instance, in Kolkata, there is a large number of non-Bengali voters such as those from Bihar and Gujarat. The Barrackpore industrial area in North 24 Paraganas district has a substantial number of non-Bengali migrant workers.

Speaking to DH, TMC spokesperson Om Prakash Mishra said that “ the TMC Government has been working consistently for their development of Hindi speaking people in Bengal. BJP is unnecessarily creating a controversy.”

“When we are saying ‘outsiders’, we don’t mean people from other states who speak in different languages… What TMC is saying that, the ideology from outside, centred around the RSS headquarters in Nagpur seeks to dominate Bengal through BJP.”

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State BJP vice president Jay Prakash Mazumdar said “the Chief Minister is trying to do some damage control following her outburst at Barrackpore (during the last Lok Sabha elections) following slogans of Jai Shree Ram. She said that people from other States were insulting her in Bengal and dubbed the BJP as the representative of Hindi speaking people.”

Political analyst and author Snigdhendu Bhattacharya said that, “the TMC supremo was trying to foil BJP’s polarisation tactics by reaching out to Hindi speaking voters.”