Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah delivered a lecture in Kolkata on Wednesday commemorating 19th-century Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. The event was part of his schedule for his two-day visit to West Bengal – which started on Wednesday – to firm up the BJP’s strategy for the Lok Sabha elections scheduled be held in 2019. However, many of the city’s intellectual elite who had received invitations to the programme from the saffron party refused to attend Shah’s lecture.

The event in memory of Chatterjee – who wrote India’s national song, the Vande Mataram – was organised by the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, a Delhi-based think tank associated with the BJP. The Hindu reported that while eminent Kolkatans such as movie actor Soumitra Chatterjee, former Supreme Court judge Ashok Ganguly, writer Santosh Rana, theatre actors Rudraprasad Sengupta, Chandan Sen and Manoj Mitra, singer Amar Paul and painter Samir Aich had received invitations from the BJP, they all turned it down.

Soumitra Chatterjee reportedly rejected the invitation with a specific complaint against “demonetisation and the party’s politics of targeting communities”.

In the end, Bengali-language writer Buddhadeb Guha was the only prominent intellectual to attend the programme, with BJP workers filling up the auditorium that has a capacity to seat 600. Union minister and BJP leader from West Bengal Babul Supriyo blamed the ruling Trinamool Congress for the guests’ no-show. “Bengal is a state where intellectuals are threatened even if they vote against the ruling party,” Supriyo told India Today. “How can they attend meetings? There are many intellectuals who support us and have connected over phone, but may not always turn up in person.”

Kicking off 2019

Shah’s speech focussed on ideas of nationalism and in line with this, the event kicked off with a homage to Mother India in the form of an image created by Bengali painter Abanindranath Tagore in 1905. “The Congress’ appeasement resulted in Partition,” Shah said, referring to the decision to retain only two stanzas of the Vande Mataram following complaints by many Muslims.

On Thursday, Shah will head to Birbhum and Purulia districts where the BJP is growing rapidly. In panchayat elections held in May, it won 645 gram panchayat seats and nine zila parishad seats in Purulia compared to the Trinamool Congress’ tally of 839 gram panchayat and 26 zila parishad seats. The BJP has also alleged that at least two of its workers in Purulia were murdered by Trinamool Congress cadre.

During his time in Bengal, Shah is also expected to set the BJP’s house in order given the factionalism in the state unit, The Economic Times reported on Wednesday. On June 20, the state’s senior BJP leader Chandra Kumar Bose had issued a public statement questioning the current BJP leadership in West Bengal.