From jhalmuri to fish, how BJP is trying to shed its outsider image in Bengal

· Scroll

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Sharadwat Mukhopadhyay got defensive when Scroll asked him if there was an element of the absurd in him going door-to-door with a large catla fish as part of his election campaign.

“It is not ridiculous,” the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate from Kolkata’s Bidhannagar seat argued. “Everything has got some meaning in politics.”

Mamata Banerjee had been lying to voters that his party would ban fish if it came to power, said the 56-year-old oncologist-turned-politician. Walking around with a fish was, in Mukhopadhyay’s view, the most effective way of convincing fellow Bengalis that the BJP respected their dietary preferences.

The gesture catapulted him to national fame last month. Soon, more visuals emerged showing several other BJP leaders carrying fish on the campaign trail or eating it in TV interviews. Clearly, Mukhopadhyay had set a trend which his party members found worthy of emulation.

Their opponents in the Trinamool Congress, meanwhile, doubled down on their allegations that the BJP might ban fish if it came to power in Bengal. To substantiate their accusations, they point to the restrictions that Bihar and other states ruled by the BJP have placed on the sale of meat, particularly beef.