AAP’s silent network expansion in Bengal
The party has started this process through silently opening up their party offices in the state as well as conducting low- profile and issue- based seminars and workshops.
Kolkata: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has started expanding its organisational network in West Bengal very silently and at an extremely slow pace.
The party has started this process through silently opening up their party offices in the state as well as conducting low- profile and issue- based seminars and workshops.
The opening of the party offices started with the inauguration of the state committee office in Kolkata before the Durga Puja. On Monday, on the auspicious occasion of Kali Puja, the party inaugurated its district office for Kolkata- adjacent North 24 Parganas district. The AAP leadership in West Bengal has plans to gradually open up district party offices in at least 20 districts where the leadership claims to have developed a reasonable block level organisational setup.
At the same time, the state party leadership is also concentrating on issued- based workshops and seminars in the districts. Recently, the party organised a conference on tribal population in the state at Durgapur in West Burdwan district making it clear that the tribal vote bank in the state is under focus of the party leadership.
Around the same time, AAP’s district leadership in the minority dominated Murshidabad district conducted a virtual workshop for the party members in six blocks of the district. The Murshidabad district leadership has introduced a system where one can become a member of the party by giving a missed call to a particular mobile number, a system that the BJP leadership in West Bengal also introduced before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections that continued till the 2021 state Assembly polls.
As regards to its alliance politics in West Bengal, the AAP leadership has already made it clear that they will maintain an equal distance with both the ruling Trinamool Congress and principal opposition, the BJP.
During the inauguration of the party’s state committee office in Kolkata last month, AAP’s in-charge in West Bengal, Sanjay Basu, made it clear that just as at the national- level their party is against the “anti- people” policies of the BJP, in the state their voices will be against “rampant corruption” unleashed by the ruling Trinamool Congress.
