Rekha Patra: BJP's surprise face in Bengal is also symbol of party's strongest poll pitch
Bengal is suddenly under the state's election spotlight as an «embodiment of the BJP's fight against atrocities on women under Mamata Banerjee's TMC dispensation». Thirty-something Rekha Patra, a housewife from the troubled region of Sandeshkhali and an alleged torture victim in the hands of arrested TMC leader Shajahan Sheikh and his cohorts, walked protest rallies against her oppressors carrying her girl child on her waist alongside scores of other women agitators from the region when local agitation against TMC leaders recently blew up.
Patra is now the BJP's Lok Sabha nominee from Basirhat, a TMC stronghold on the southern-most fringes of North 24 Parganas district, and is the sole candidate of her party so far to have received a personal telephone call from Prime Minister Narendra Modi who talked to her about her campaign preparations and was lauded by the leader as «Shakti Swarupa» (an embodiment of the essence of Shakti).
She is also the party's surprise candidate through whom the BJP is trying to make its strongest political statement in Bengal: that it plans to steal the issue of women's safety from under the sails of Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress for the upcoming polls.
Among the most vocal Sandeshkhali protestors, it was based on Patra's complaint that Bengal police arrested Shibaprasad Hazra, a local muscleman and Sheikh's associate.
Patra is also believed to have been part of the group that met Modi on the sidelines of his public meeting in Barasat on March 6 and related the plight of
