‘Vote without fear’: Amit Shah tells Bengal, vows to scrap Article 370 and bring NRC

BJP president Amit Shah on Monday told rallies in West Bengal that a returning BJP government would scrap Article 370 of the Constitution, which gives special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and introduce a National Register of Citizens across the country. He spoke while campaigning in the Uluberia Lok Sabha seat in Howrah and in Krishnanagar in Nadia district.

Appeal to voters and attack on Mamata

Shah asked people in Bengal to vote without fear, saying BJP workers were protecting them as guardians of democracy. He claimed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was anxious after the second phase of polling, that she had blocked his rallies in the state, and that crowds were now staying away from hers.

He accused the Trinamool Congress of running a “mafia raj”, alleged that the state led the country in cow smuggling and had become a safe haven for infiltrators, and said Bengal had been turned into a bankrupt state where only Banerjee’s relatives and TMC ministers had prospered. He said the party’s “Maa, Maati, Manush” slogan had turned into infiltration, goonda raj and bribery.

Shah asked Banerjee to say whether she, like her ally Omar Abdullah of the National Conference, supported a separate prime minister for Jammu and Kashmir. He accused her of questioning the air strikes to please her minority vote bank and, borrowing a line from a popular 1990s film song, said that if Pakistan fired bullets India would reply with shells.

Article 370, Citizenship Bill and NRC

Shah said the Congress and the TMC wanted Article 370 to stay. He said the BJP would first bring the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill so that refugees received citizenship, and then roll out the NRC in every state to identify and remove infiltrators. Banerjee has said the NRC, so far confined to Assam, could turn genuine Indians into foreigners; the exercise became controversial after about 40 lakh people living in Assam were left out of the complete draft released last year.

Referring to the Indian Air Force strike at Balakot, carried out after 40 CRPF personnel were killed in Kashmir, Shah said it was mourned in only two places: Pakistan and Banerjee’s office.

The contest in Bengal

Shah urged voters to give the BJP more than 23 of the state’s 42 seats, saying the “syndicate raj” would then end within 90 days. In Bengal, “syndicate” refers to businesses run by politically protected groups that allegedly force builders to buy construction material, often of poor quality at high prices. The BJP had won two seats in the state in 2014 against the TMC’s 34.

Bengal votes in all seven phases. Five seats polled in the first two phases on April 11 and 18; the last phase is on May 19 and counting on May 23.

What happened next

The BJP won 303 of 543 seats nationally when votes were counted on 23 May 2019. Parliament ended Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 in August 2019, and passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in December 2019.

See also: elections

Originally published on 22 April 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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