Shah sets 24 in ’24 target for BJP Bengal

NEW DELHI: In a closed-door meeting held with the top leadership of the Bengal BJP, the party’s former national president and Union Home Minister Amit Shah has set an ambitious target for the Bengal unit which is to get at least 24 seats for the party in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The key meeting was held last week when Amit Shah was visiting Kolkata for the Eastern Zonal Council meeting and had made an unscheduled stop at the Bengal BJP headquarters in Kolkata and held a 30-minute-long meeting with the top and key leadership of the Bengal unit of the BJP.
According to sources present in the meeting, Shah expressed his concern over the decline in the graph of the BJP in the state and also asked the leaders from the state the reasons for the party’s poor performance in the municipal corporation elections held earlier this year.
This meeting, which was held at around 8.30 pm at the BJP headquarters, also saw the presence of Leader of the Opposition, Suvendu Adhikari, state president Sukanta Mazumdar, state general secretary (organisation) Amitava Chakraborty, MPs such as Locket Chatterjee, Swapan Dasgupta, state in-charges, Sunil Bansal, Mangal Pandey and Satish Dhoond, amongst several other leaders.
Sources told The Sunday Guardian that Shah also asked for a report from the newly appointed in-charge of the BJP for Bengal and former Bihar Cabinet Minister, Mangal Pandey and “super in-charge” Sunil Bansal on the status of the party in the state.
Shah, according to sources, has also given a target to the BJP to win at least 24 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats for the party in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. “Amit Shahji has categorically told the state president and Sunil Bansal that the party needs 24 seats from West Bengal in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. He has now coined this slogan for the party ‘2024 mein BJP ka 24 seat or 24 mein 24’,” a BJP leader present at the meeting told this correspondent.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP for the first time won 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats from Bengal. Apparently, Shah was also unhappy with the Bengal BJP leaders for not being able to play the role of a strong opposition party in the state. Sources also told this correspondent that some MPs present in the meeting had raised concerns about the fact that the CPM was doing more rallies against the ruling Trinamool Congress than the BJP, despite the BJP being the principal opposition party.
Shah agreed and told party leaders present in the meeting that the CPM was slowly coming up to become the opposition party in the state as their vote share also saw an uptick in the municipal corporation elections held in the state earlier this year.
“Amit Shah was concerned with the fall of the BJP in Bengal and the rise of CPM. Shah has given clear instructions to all BJP leaders in the meeting that in the upcoming panchayat elections, the BJP has to perform better than the CPM and that its elected MLAs and MPs cannot ignore their responsibility and that they would have to work together to ensure that the party is able to get a significant number of seats during the election,” the BJP leader quoted above said.
The panchayat elections in West Bengal are scheduled to be held sometime in March and April next year and many political observers believe that these elections will be the litmus test for both the BJP and the Trinamool Congress ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.