The West Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has suddenly been reminded about distributing free vaccines to everyone in the state.
On Friday (April 23) the state unit tweeted that it would fulfil this promise once elected to power after May 2. The announcement has come as a part of damage limitation exercise as the BJP has come under heavy bombardment from different sections of the society for doing nothing but just carrying on the election campaign even when as high as 12,000 cases of corona virus were reported only on Thursday. West Bengal reported 56 deaths in the last 24 hours. Two phases of elections are due on April 26 and 29 in the state.
Besides, this tweet has come in response to chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s repeated attack on the BJP-led Centre on the corona front. Only on Thursday she said in a rally that her party government would launch free vaccine drive from May 5.
In her first virtual rally on Friday, she once again came down heavily on the BJP for letting down the people of West Bengal by shifting oxygen from the state to Uttar Pradesh.
The Trinamool Congress was quick to hit back to BJP’s tweet. The party said that the saffron party made a similar election promise on the eve of the Oct-Nov 2020 Assembly election in Bihar where it is running the government in alliance with the Janata Dal-United. But in Bihar the BJP is yet to fulfil its promise and the number of people vaccinated in the state is very small when compared to other states.
As per official data only 63 lakh people could be vaccinated in the state so far which is about five per cent of the population.
