Mamata Banerjee on Monday to hit campaign trail in poll-bound WB
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Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s full-scale campaign for the July 8 Panchayat elections is scheduled to start on Monday.
The Chief Minister will kick-start the campaign from the district of Cooch Behar in North Bengal with a public rally.
According to party sources, Mamata will reach Cooch Behar by Sunday night.
After Cooch Behar, the chief minister is likely to address another rally in the Alipurduar district and the details are yet to be finalized, a senior party leader said.
"Recently, a meeting of the party's top leadership was conducted at the chief ministers' residence to finalize the campaign strategy for the rural civic body polls. There the chief minister clearly directed all the top leaders to take the polls with equal seriousness like Lok Sabha and Assembly polls and hence take part in the campaign process with equal seriousness.”
"So going by the proverb 'practice what you preach' the chief minister is herself participating in the campaign process this time," said a senior party leader who did not wish to be named.
According to political observers, the chief minister's campaign kick-off from North Bengal is an indication of the importance that the ruling party leadership is stressing on the region considering that in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls not a single constituency in the region came to the kitty of Trinamool Congress.
In fact, the party national general secretary and Lok Sabha member Abhishek Banerjee too started his recently concluded mass-outreach program from Cooch Behar district only. Even in the 2021 West Bengal polls, BJP's performance from the constituencies in North Bengal was extraordinarily better than the other pockets in the state.
In fact, a section of the senior Trinamool Congress leadership has also admitted in private that the results of the panchayat elections in the rural civic body polls will be an indication of how the trend will be in the big battle of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
With inputs from IANS