Union Home Minister and senior BJP leader Amit Shah will address the people of West Bengal through a "virtual rally" on June 8, state party president Dilip Ghosh said. He added that the party would reach out to people, "apprising them of the achievements of the Narendra Modi government in its first year of the second term and steps taken by the Centre to deal with the crisis caused due to the COVID pandemic."
"As right now, public rallies are banned. So we are stressing on virtual rallies on social media. It will be a five-day-long campaign, with the first virtual rally on June 8", said Ghosh.
"Just like normal rallies, during these virtual rallies there will be speakers, and the main speaker of the June 8 rally would be Amit Shah, he would speak from New Delhi," Ghosh told reporters on Monday.
Shah had last addressed a rally in Kolkata on March 1, a pro CAA rally at Shahid Minar ground.
According to state BJP sources, during virtual rallies, the state BJP would highlight the state's TMC government's "mishandling" of the dual crisis of COVID pandemic and Cyclone Amphan.
"During those rallies, we would propagate how the state government mishandled the crisis. How our party leaders, were not allowed to carry out relief work, how our leaders were not allowed to visit the cyclone-affected areas," Ghosh said.
With an eye on next year's assembly polls, the BJP reconstituted its West Bengal unit on Monday, inducting more than a dozen new faces including turncoats and dropping Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's grandnephew Chandra Bose who opposed the party's stand on CAA and NRC. It also brought in new and younger faces to head the party's women and youth fronts.
The TMC has been on a sticky wicket in Bengal since the last Lok Sabha polls in which it lost 12 parliamentary seats to BJP.
The saffron camp had then emerged as the primary challenger of TMC in the state by winning 18 out of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state and TMC's tally coming down to 22 from 34.
