OH MY ‘GHOSH’! The curious case of Bengal BJP

Dilip Ghosh, national vicepresident of the BJP, has been recently given organisational responsibilities in seven states and a Union territory even as there are rumours in the Saffron camp that the central leadership may have done “this” in Bengal to give the leadership a free hand and enough room to exercise their power.

Ghosh’s new assignment is to oversee and strengthen the party’s booth organisations in Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, Manipur, Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura and Andaman ahead of the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha polls. He will be functioning as a member of the committee which will spearhead the move. The committee also has BJP’s national chief JP Nadda and general secretary (organisation) BL Santosh. About 75,000 booths have been identified for the purpose.

It may be noted that Ghosh’s term as the Bengal BJP president ended prematurely after the “outcome” of crucial Assembly polls in May 2021.

A closer look though would reveal that the BJP had grown under Ghosh’s leadership when the party’s Lok Sabha tally rose from two in 2014 to 18 in 2019 and from three seats in the 2016 Assembly elections to 77 in the 2021 Assembly elections!

In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, while the TMC garnered 39.05% vote share, BJP’s percentage vote share was pegged at just 17.02%, a gain of +10.88 per cent.

In the 2019 general elections the TMC’s vote share went up to 43.3 per cent… up by 3.48 per cent…but the real newsmaker was the BJP with a whopping vote share of 40.7 per cent up by 22.76%!

The corridors of BJP HQ in West Bengal were then buzzing with the leadership capabilities of Ghosh and “finally” the “Saffron might” started believing that there’s hope for the party in West Bengal.

With that belief, the party had put in all its might into the crucial Assembly elections in 2021… and several TMC leaders also made a beeline to join the BJP sensing prospects for the Saffron camp.

However, all zeal was over by May 2, 2021 when despite a high-octane campaign, the BJP failed to get anywhere closer to the three-figure mark.

It was obvious that some heads were to roll and it seemed all was not well in the party’s state unit.

Trouble started way back On July 2, 2021, when Ghosh said he was unaware of LoP Suvendu Adhikari’s trip to Delhi and what transpired between him and Amit Shah and Harsh Vardhan.

Ghosh’s comment was seen by political analysts as a sign of the growing rift between two camps in the Bengal BJP, one led by Ghosh and the other by Adhikari.

Then again in the first week of June in 2021, Adhikari had visited Delhi to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, BJP national president JP Nadda. Even then, Ghosh had said he was unaware of the trip and its reasons.

After that Delhi trip in early June, Adhikari said he had informed the state BJP general-secretary, Amitava Chakraborty. Adhikari, however, refused to comment when he was told about Ghosh’s claim that he was unaware of the former’s visit to Delhi.

If you thought this was not enough… sample this…

Bengal BJP’s current president Sukanta Majumdar and his predecessor Dilip Ghosh on April 25, 2022 publicly traded barbs over their (political) experience at a time when the party is plagued by infighting.

Ghosh had even quipped that Majumdar was new to politics.

“Everyone begins politics as inexperienced. When I became the state president, I had been an MP for two-anda-half years. I had political experience of two-and-a-half years. When Dilipda began, he had experience between six months and a year,” Majumdar told the media.

In response to Majumdar’s jibe, Ghosh said the party had made a “42-year-old youth” as the state president.

“I didn’t say (that Majumdar is inexperienced), he (Majumdar) himself did,” Ghosh said. “I’m always with him. Our party has made a 42-year-old youth the chief of a state where we have so many MPs and MLAs. In other parties, one isn’t named a chief unless he/she is old. These young people will work for the party for the next 50 years,” he added.

All this has obviously not gone down well with the central leadership especially at a time when there is so much Bengal BJP could do on Ground Zero given the fact that CBI is grilling TMC honchos for the SSC, coal and cattle scams and it was time the Saffron party took out massive rallies to mobilise mass opinion on these issues… however, the party is haunted by infighting especially at the top.

Earlier this month, when Shah had visited Bengal, Majumdar and Adhikari were seen with him all along. Ghosh was, however, invited to specific programmes and was not present at the dinner party hosted by BCCI chief Sourav Ganguly at his Behala residence. BJP’s central leadership must realise that whatever may have happened in the Assembly elections in 2021, but the party cannot afford to take the Lok Sabha lightly especially when it had a good standing in 2019 and 2024 is not far away!

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

ROBIN ROY The writer is Senior Associate Editor, Free Press Journal, Mumbai and former Managing Editor, First India