KOLKATA: BJP insiders blame the lack of cohesion, bad blood and even infighting and sabotage for the repeated failures of the party in Bengal.
Despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah making repeated visits to Bengal to help the BJP gain electoral traction, internal issues of the state unit are making such efforts go waste.
The problem runs deep for the state BJP: the 2021 Assembly polls, the 2023 Panchayat polls and the 2024 Lok Sabha polls have highlighted the repeated failures of the state leadership to get its act together.
The most recent setback has been the by-elections to four Assembly seats, all of which the Trinamool Congress won handsomely even though three of the seats had been with the BJP while one had given the Trinamool Congress a slender lead.
Even in the just-concluded Lok Sabha elections, the BJP got very comfortable leads from all the three Assembly segments, and also fared quite well in the fourth. That’s why the BJP’s stunning defeats in all these four seats is not only humiliating for the party, but also signals that the party has gone into a decline in Bengal.
Observers feel that unless the Central leadership takes immediate remedial steps, the going will get worse for the party since the Assembly elections will be held in 2026.
Swarajya, the right-wing publication headed by well-known BJP supporters, wrote recently: “The performance of the BJP candidates in the bypolls should serve as an urgent wake-up call for the central leadership which can only put off the urgently required drastic overhaul of the Bengal unit at the party’s own peril. If nothing is done and drift allowed to continue, the BJP central leadership may well resign itself to the saffron party becoming a marginal and even inconsequential political force in Bengal very soon.”
Byelections were held in the Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagdah, Raiganj and Maniktala Assembly seats just five weeks after the Lok Sabha results were declared and the results were declared on July 13. The BJP had won the first three (Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagdah and Raiganj) in 2021 with comfortable margins. The Trinamool Congress had won Maniktala.
But even after all the BJP MLAs of the three seats defected to the Trinamool in and after 2021, the BJP secured leads in all the three Assembly segments in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
Ranaghat Dakshin Assembly constituency is part of the Ranaghat Lok Sabha seat which the BJP’s Jagannath Sarkar won this time (2024 Lok Sabha elections) by a margin of nearly 1.87 lakh votes. Sarkar trounced Trinamool’s Mukut Mani Adhikari. Adhikari had won the Ranaghat Dakshin Assembly seat, a stronghold of the Matuas, in 2021 on a BJP ticket. He is considered to be a poster boy of the Matua Mahasangha. But Adhikari defected to the Trinamool Congress in March this year and was fielded by Mamata Banerjee for the Lok Sabha elections from Ranaghat.
Sarkar had got a lead of over 37,000 votes from the Ranaghat Dakshin Assembly segment in the Lok Sabha elections. Despite the drubbing he received in the Lok Sabha elections, Adhikari was fielded by the Trinamool once again in the Assembly by-elections from Ranaghat Dakshin. The BJP fielded Manoj Biswas, a Matua, in the by-elections. But that was a poor choice.
Biswas is a resident of Krishnanagar and his nomination set off waves of protests by BJP workers and local functionaries who demanded that a local (resident of Ranaghat) be given the party ticket. The party leadership ignored the protests and Adhikari, who had trailed by a huge margin from this Assembly segment very recently, defeated Biswas by more than 9,000 votes.
In the Bagdah Assembly, the Trinamool Congress fielded Central Minister Shantanu Thakur’s cousin Madhupurna Thakur in the byelections while the BJP fielded Binay Biswas, a leader of the Matua Mahasangha. But as in Ranaghat Dakshin, the BJP’s nominee faced protests from party workers in Bagdah as well since he was not a “local”. An RSS functionary of Bagdah, Satyajit Majumdar, was fielded by angry local BJP functionaries as an Independent candidate. Though he did not get any significant number of votes, he queered the pitch for the BJP candidate.
The BJP’s defeats in Bagdah and Ranaghat Dakshin indicate that the saffron party is losing the support of the Matuas, an influential OBC community of refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which the BJP thought would seal the support of the Matuas for the party for years to come, has not worked primarily because the Trinamool Congress has succeeded in sowing doubts among the Matuas over its provisions. The state BJP failed to counter the Trinamool’s propaganda.
In Raiganj, the BJP had fielded Manas Kumar Ghosh, who had defected from the Trinamool Congress to the BJP last year, as its candidate for the byelections. Ghosh was handpicked by Suvendu Adhikari and his defeat is considered to be a huge embarrassment for Adhikari. In Raiganj, local BJP workers and functionaries were unhappy with the party’s choice of candidate and did not work for Ghosh.
In Maniktala constituency in Kolkata, while the Trinamool Congress put up a united fight for its candidate Supti Pande, a long-time friend of party supremo Mamata Banerjee, the BJP’s candidate Kalyan Chaubey played a lone hand.
Chaubey, a former footballer and current president of the All India Football Federation, joined the BJP in 2015 and was fielded by the party in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from the Krishnanagar Lok Sabha seat. He lost to the Trinamool’s Mahua Moitra. In 2021, he was fielded by the BJP from Maniktala Assembly constituency. He lost to Sadhan Pande by a margin of more than 20,000 votes, but got a respectable vote share of 35.6%. His vote share fell sharply to 17.93% in the bypolls this time, apparently reflecting erosion of support for the BJP in this urban constituency.
BJP insiders blame the lack of cohesion, bad blood and even infighting and sabotage for the repeated failures of the party in Bengal. Another major reason for the Assembly bypoll loss was the selection of some candidates, and the inability of the leaders to invigorate the rank and file.
“Supporters are moving away from the BJP,” Abhijit Das, alias Bobby, the BJP Lok Sabha candidate who lost to the Trinamool Congress’ Abhishek Banerjee in Diamond Harbour, told The Sunday Guardian. “The reason is that the party is not standing by its karyakartas,” he adds.
Das, a long-time RSS functionary, lost the Diamond Harbour seat by a record margin of 7.1 lakh votes amid allegations of widespread malpractices against which he has filed an election petition.
He says that the disappointing performance of the party in the 2021 Assembly elections was compounded by fierce attacks on party workers and supporters by Trinamool Congress goons. The BJP state and central leadership failed to stand by the party cadres and supporters. As a result, the BJP saw a huge erosion of workers.
Left to fend for themselves, a large number of party workers and lower-level functionaries, fearing for their lives and disappointed by the absence of any support from the party leadership, chose to disassociate themselves from the party or even joined the Trinamool Congress to save themselves and their families and properties, he says.
Das himself has been showcaused and suspended by the BJP after his supporters—who had taken shelter in his sister’s house following the post-poll violence—gathered round the convoy of Central leaders who had come for an on-spot assessment.
This week, the extended state executive committee meeting called to discuss the electoral debacle in the presence of senior BJP leader and Central Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, only opened up fresh wounds.
Leaders pointed out the lack of ground-level presence, coordination and other organisational shortcomings, indirectly blaming Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari, who was leading the charge against the Trinamool Congress, and the state leadership of Sukanta Majumdar, organising secretary Amitava Chakraborty and the state secretary Jagannath Chattopadhyay.
Speaking at the executive committee meeting, Suvendu Adhikari stated: “We do not need to talk about Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas. We will decide who supports us, and we will support them. Stop this talk of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas,” he had said, advocating that the BJP Minority Cell be disbanded.
All senior party leaders in the state immediately disassociated themselves from Adhikari’s words. BJP’s Minority Morcha national president, Jamal Siddiqui, said: “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas (development and trust for all) is the soul of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Just as a body is useless without a soul, the BJP is nothing without Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas.”
He said that Adhikari’s statement, “Jo humare saath, hum unke saath,” was made “impulsively”.
“Suvendu Adhikari is new to the BJP, having joined only a few years ago, and may still be influenced by his past political experiences in the Trinamool Congress, where the focus was solely on gaining power,” he added.
“Things have been going downhill for the BJP since 2020 when, in its zeal to capture power in Bengal, it started engineering a string of defections from the Trinamool Congress. While it may have added to its ranks by doing so, the BJP lost the ‘party with a difference’ tag.
The huge number of scam-tainted and corruption-accused Trinamool Congress functionaries across all levels who flocked to the BJP tainted the image of the BJP permanently.
“Among the turncoats were also many ‘Trojan horses’ who the Trinamool leadership planted within the BJP to work as saboteurs within the saffron party. That the BJP central leadership has failed to weed out these ‘undesirables’ has raised serious doubts about the intent, or the lack of it, on the part of the BJP central leadership to set things right in Bengal.”
He also blames the BJP setback for failing to project a “son of the soil” (a Bengali)—an untainted, committed and charismatic leader—who would be a strong counter to Mamata Banerjee.
“The state party unit is perceived to be under the shadow of some central leaders, something that does not go down well with Bengal’s electorate. The poor show in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls—the BJP’s tally fell from 18 (of 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal) in 2019 to 12 this time—was hardly surprising,” says Biswanath Chakraborty, a political science professor from Rabindra Bharati University.
“Unless the BJP Central leadership manages to drill sense, discipline and teamwork into its state leadership, the state unit will only be a big flop. This has been proved time and time again,” sums up veteran political journalist Suman Chattopadhyay. “Remember, victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”