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Subhash Chandra Bose's Grandnephew is BJP's Candidate Against Mamata
http://www.outlookindia.com/newswire/story/subhash-chandra-boses-grandnephew-is-bjps-candidate-against-mamata/932953BJP today declared Chandra Kumar Bose, grandnephew of Subhash Chandra Bose, its candidate against West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in Bhawanipur constituency in the upcoming Assembly elections.
"Chandra Kumar Bose will be BJP's candidate against Mamata Banerjee," Union Minister Smriti Irani told a press conference here.
BJP is trying hard to make its presence felt in the state where it had drawn a blank in the Assembly polls and the party believes that a high-pitched battle against the TMC chief could be of help.
Bose said the change for which people had voted TMC to power in 2011 had not come and only BJP was capable of bringing it.
"Chandra Kumar Bose will be BJP's candidate against Mamata Banerjee," Union Minister Smriti Irani told a press conference here.
BJP is trying hard to make its presence felt in the state where it had drawn a blank in the Assembly polls and the party believes that a high-pitched battle against the TMC chief could be of help.
Bose said the change for which people had voted TMC to power in 2011 had not come and only BJP was capable of bringing it.
For anybody interested in some inside baseball (cricket?) about Indian politics...
Mamata Banerjee is the Chief Minister (roughly a Governor in US terms) of the state of West Bengal; she is usually called "Didi" ("big sister", though it's less creepy sounding in Bengali than in English). She runs the TMC party which was part of Congress's center-left coalition that was recently destroyed in national elections by Modi's BJP (TMC itself did pretty well; the rest of the coalition got thumped). West Bengal had been Communist for decades until she won the elections there in 2011.
CK Bose is the nephew of SC Bose ("Netaji", "respected leader"
, who was an Indian nationalist leader in the 1930s and 1940s who recruited, trained, and led troops who fought for Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (oops...). He's universally admired in West Bengal to the extent that after his death at the end of WWII there was a cottage industry of claimed sightings of him that lasted well into the 1960s (my wife's uncle is convinced he was living in Singapore, having cut a deal with the British. Or it's possible he just says that to mess with me. It's hard to tell with uncles.).
Anyhoo, BJP is having a rough 2016 so far (they lost the local elections in Delhi and they're losing ground in several southern states because they're having trouble putting a budget together), so this may just be a publicity stunt, but if he does win that will mean West Bengal went from being explicitly communist to right wing in the space of 5 years...
