How do we know that elections are round the corner? When the Election Mantri—sorry, Pradhan Mantri—begins traveling furiously across the country, temple-hopping, inaugurating projects, and notifying laws that have lain dormant for years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not bothered to go to West Bengal for the past three years; he visited in 2021 for the assembly election, in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 77 seats and became the Opposition in the state.
After the election results were out, Modi seemed to forget about West Bengal entirely. Suddenly, with the Lok Sabha elections ahead, Modi has travelled there not once or twice but three times in a fortnight, making promises galore. The grim reality is that 59 lakh NREGA workers in West Bengal haven’t received their wages and 11.36 lakh people don’t have homes because the Modi government has not allocated funds to the state for central schemes. But, oh well, never mind, it’s election season and the Election Mantri will promise all those things that he will never do as the Pradhan Mantri.
