When India is witnessing the three-phase election for Bihar assembly, Home Minister, Amit Shah is busy executing ‘Mission Bengal’. The BJP is hoping to wrest power and control over Bengal from Mamata Banerjee in the next year’s Vidhan Sabha elections.

In this context, the Matua community has once again come under the limelight. Bengal CM Mamta Banerjee made several big announcements for the tribal communities recently. The state government entrusted the right of land to 25 thousand refugee families and said that 1.25 lakh families would benefit from it. The CM had allocated Rs 10 crore for Matua Development Board and Rs 5 crore for Namasudra Development Board.

From the side of BJP, Amit Shah recently paid a visit to a Matua household in Bankura and had his lunch there. Before reaching the residence of Nabin Biswas, a member of the community, Shah went to a temple of the Matuas in the locality where he spent some time. Accompanied by BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvergiya, BJP national vice-president Mukul Roy and state party chief Dilip Ghosh, Shah had his lunch sitting on the floor of Nabin Biswas’ two-storied house at Gauranganagar area.

This trip under Shah’s tribal outreach programme in Bankura district brought good luck to a tribal woman in another part of the state.  Geeta Mahali, who had hosted Shah three years back at her home in Naxalbari village, received an appointment letter from West Bengal government’s home department on Thursday for working as Special Home Guard. TV grabs showed a teary-eyed Geeta shyly showing her appointment letter to media persons who landed at her home after they were alerted by the local TMC leadership. After Shah had lunch at the house of the tribal couple-Raju and Geeta Mahali in a much-publicized event, the state’s ruling party Trinamool Congress (TMC) had managed to persuade the duo to join TMC. This turnaround had caused much embarrassment to the BJP and Shah who was then president of the party.

This provision of job comes tactically at a time when Shah had arrived in a Matua household for lunch in order to coax the community. A delegation of the Trinamool Congress headed by its Darjeeling district president Ranjan Sarkar went to the house of Raju and Gita Mahali, the tribal couple in Katiyajote of Nakshalbari, which is 35 km away from Siliguri. They announced the appointment of Mahali as a home guard. Sarkar claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had given “false assurances”, ‘a castle in the air’ stories, and alleged that no one came to the couple from the “saffron party” during the time of the mismanaged lockdown.

The author is a student of Amity centre of Happiness