Cong party's decision not to field Priyanka against Modi disappointing: Arun Jaitley
New Delhi, Apr 25: Taking a dig at Congress, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Thursday said he was "disappointed" by the party's decision of not fielding Priyanka Gandhi against Prime Minister Narendra Modi after building up a "suspense for an eventual thriller" in the Lok Sabha elections.
Modi is contesting from Varanasi for the Lok Sabha and there were speculations that Congress would field Priyanka against him. However, the party Thursday again named Ajay Rai, a political lightweight who was a distant third after Modi and Arvind Kejriwal in the 2014 general election, as its candidate from the holy city.
"The build-up of the last two weeks had been that Priyanka would be fielded against the Prime Minister. She rejoiced in giving daily bytes to the media that she was ready to take on the Prime Minister. Her brother (Congress President Rahul Gandhi) claimed that the party was building up the suspense for an eventual thriller.
"Obviously, she quietly chickened out of the contest. I am deeply disappointed with the Congress party's decision of not fielding Priyanka from Varanasi," Jaitley wrote in a Facebook post titled 'Refuge in Wayanad and a Refuge Away From Varanasi The Story of a Family Dynasty'.
Targeting the Gandhis, Jaitley said the myth that 'Priyanka will make a difference' has been eroded.
Comparing developmental works in Amethi and Rae Bareli the traditional constituencies of Gandhis with Varanasi, Jaitley said, "The cards are out in the open for public scrutiny. The Gandhis must introspect the plight of Amethi and Rae Bareli in the last forty years and compare it to what the Prime Minister has done in Varanasi in the past five years".
Jaitley said several development works, including building of highways, arterial roads and modernisation of electricity systems, have taken place in Varanasi in the last five years.
Speculation on Priyanka Gandhi making her political debut from Varanasi was fuelled after Congress president Rahul Gandhi, to a question on whether he planned to field his sister against PM Modi, said last week, "I will leave you in suspense. Suspense is not always a bad thing."
Jaitley said had Congress fielded Priyanka against Modi, it would have given India an opportunity to decide the fate of a "tried, tested and successful leader" as against a "new political dynasty".
India is not a banana republic, the minister said, adding "It is only juvenile politics, where a family lives under an illusion that people will accept it irrespective of credentials, which persuades you to build a climax of Priyanka taking on the Prime Minister and then suffer the wrath of the anti-climax."
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
