‘BJP colour’ top choice for chair-makers

KOLKATA: One of the indicators of the election mood has always been the sheer number of chairs that adorn party gatherings. This time, saffron seems to be the colour of the season. When Left Front was in power, manufacturers would seldom take plastic chair orders except for red. They started making green chairs from the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, when Trinamool Congress was in the reckoning.After the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, when BJP’s vote share rose to 17%, saffron chairs made way into the city.
The ‘BJP colour’ is in demand in 37 wards under Kolkata Municipal Corporation where BJP had a lead in the last Lok Sabha polls.
Sitting in his election office with campaign flex and party flags scattered all over, BJP organizer from ward 45 Bimal Sharma was busy making phone calls to decorators, placing an order for 200 chairs for a party gathering. Sharma reminded the decorator about the colour code — saffron. He, however, is not an exception. BJP organizers all over are only using saffron chairs in their election meetings.
When asked for a reason to be so strict about the chair colour, Sharma said people can identify the gathering from chair colours.
“We have young minds in charge of the party’s publicity and they are the ones who came up with the idea of saffron chairs for better recognition,” he added.
Md Samsad, who owns a decorating business at MG Road and is a BJP candidate from ward 39, said that the demand for saffron chairs is a recent phenomenon. “The first order for saffron chairs came last September during the assembly bypolls,” he said.
A dealer in Burrabazar echoed Samsad. “Seven months ago, when the assembly bypolls were round the corner, Supreme, the company that manufactures these chairs sent us 20 to test the market. They were sold out in one day. We sold more than a thousand chairs in that election season,” said store-owner Vishal Pathak.
With the positive market research results, Supreme began large-scale manufacture of the same chairs at the same price but in saffron.
Biswajeet Sil, sales officer at Supreme, said that the rise in the BJP vote share prompted them to start producing saffron chairs. The marketing department had sensed that the Narendra Modi wave had also reached Bengal. “It was an obvious decision to react to this political development,” Sil said.