West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee will inaugurate the Ganga Sagar Mela in South 24 Parganas on Tuesday, a venue where a large number of people gather to take a holy dip at Makar Sankranti. She will hold an administrative meeting at Kakdwip on Monday.
With armed goons on a rampage inside Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University on Sunday evening, and large-scale protests across the country on the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), Banerjee’s is likely to take up the issue at some point during her programmes in Sagar. On Sunday evening, she took to Twitter to condemn the attack on students.
Thousands of people visit the Sagar Island on Makar Sankranti every year for taking a holy dip at the confluence of River Ganges and the Bay of Bengal.
The island, which lies in the Ganges delta about 100 km south of Kolkata, is under the South 24 Parganas district and part of the Sunderbans. It is also known as Gangasagar or Sagardwip. The pilgrims offer puja at the Kapil Muni temple. According to some estimates, in 2018, nearly 20 lakh people visited Gangasagar Mela.
Like the Kumbh Mela, the Ganga Sagar Mela is a major religious fair of the Hindus, and people from various parts of the country assemble at the Sagar Island for the event. Banerjee is likely to take up the issue of “divisive politics” of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led government at the Centre during this time. She has maintained that NRC, NPR and the CAA won’t be implemented in West Bengal and that no one from any of the minority communities will have to leave the state.
She has also assured people that her government won’t let the BJP divide people along religious or linguistic lines. Also, she has been saying that the CAA and the NRC will affect Hindus and Muslims alike, and therefore her meeting at Sagar Island around a major event in the Hindu religious calendar is bound to be significant.
The Bengal CM has been seeking the support of non-BJP parties across the country to unite in order to prevent the implementation of CAA and NRC. An all-party meeting in Delhi is scheduled on January 13 comprising all the major opposition leaders.
Comments are closed.