KOLKATA: West Bengal government on Tuesday asked the Bengal BJP leaders to join a meeting to finalise the schedule for rath yatra . Home secretary Atri Bhattacharya is likely to meet Bengal BJP leaders at Nabanna here within two days.“We have submitted detailed routes with the state secretariat and they have informed us that they are ready for talks. We are waiting for the home secretary to finalise the dates,” said state BJP president Dilip Ghosh.The revised routes were submitted with the state government after the yatra schedule was finalised last week.The 7,000km yatra, scheduled to start from December 7, will roll across 294 assembly constituencies and 42 Lok Sabha constituencies with the party’s top leaders leading the rallies. The first yatra, which the party president Amit Shah will inaugurate, will be flagged off from Coochbehar. The second will start from Sagar in South 24 Parganas while the third will be flagged off from Tarapith. Apart from the BJP heavyweights from the centre, state leaders like Rahul Sinha, Roopa Ganguly, Mukul Roy and Locket Chatterjee will remain present at the meetings to be arranged in each of the Lok Sabha constituencies.“None of the yatras will have duration of less than 37 days. It can even cross 40 days. While it will not be possible to touch each of the 78,000 booths in the state, we will arrange for thousands of upa-rath (smaller chariots) which will join the main procession,” said Jayprakash Mazumdar, state vice-president of the BJP.The party has chalked out a plan to have upa-rath for each of the booths in the areas far off from the main course of the yatra. “The main rath will continue its journey to Siliguri in north Bengal, while upa-rath from areas like Kalimpong will join it en-route,” a BJP leader said.“We will talk about the ground realities in West Bengal. Therefore, we have named the rally accordingly as Save Democracy Yatra,” said Pankaj Roy, convenor of the BJP’s intellectual cell.Meanwhile, the publicity, election management cell and IT cell of the BJP have planned to start a mammoth digital media campaign while the yatra will continue. “The target is to reach out to each of the five crore smartphone users in the state. That will provide us with an advantage before the poll campaign is launched,” said a BJP leader. Short audio-visual clips are being prepared with the help of professionals and will be played across social networking sites from next week.

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