Counting day of West Bengal Assembly elections. Time: 11.20am. Venue: Third floor of a BJP office in Salt Lake. In his trademark white half-shirt and black trousers, state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya looks uncharacteristically tense. Those who know him say he is characteristically laidback, intense but rarely tense.
“Any update from Purba Bardhaman?” he asks someone. Purba Bardhaman has 16 Assembly seats, swing seats at that. Someone mumbles a reply — “Counting is slow there.” Bhattacharya keeps pacing the long corridor and entering the adjoining rooms restlessly. Barely an hour later, he enters the room where Union minister and Bengal election in-charge Bhupender Yadav is present. The tally on the TV screen shows the BJP leading in 165 seats.
A fortnight later, while on his way to a temple in Howrah, Bhattacharya tells The Telegraph, “I was confident enough. But I always get tense on result day.”
Assembly elections have come and gone, and Bhattacharya has moved from being BJP spokesperson to BJP state president to one of the chief agents of the party’s historic win in West Bengal, all within the span of a year. But the air about him has not changed. Unlike most politicians today, he is neither suspicious nor wary of the press, was and still is most accessible to all and sundry, and can always talk himself out of a situation.
At the Calcutta Club The Telegraph National Debate earlier this year, Bhattacharya was the last person to speak for the motion — Status quo has been the unmaking of Bengal. He took the podium and delivered a good old fashioned speech, an impassioned bhadralok’s argument. The impact of it and his political stature was not lost on the audience or the moderator.
Gentle logical persuasion is Bhattacharya’s forte. Party insiders say it is this quality that helped solder a ragtag Bengal BJP. During Dilip Ghosh’s presidentship, the BJP had upped its seat tally but the party remained divided. Bhattacharya’s immediate predecessor Sukanta Majumdar did not have Ghosh’s “rugged” and “rustic” manner, but the professor from North Bengal also made headlines more than once for his aggressive talk as well as walk. During his tenure too, the fractures within the party remained and deepened.
Bhattacharya, despite being the first BJP MLA from the state, languished as the BJP spokesperson for many years. When he was given the top job in July 2025, he toed a new line altogether. Says senior BJP leader Raju Banerjee, “At a programme organised at Calcutta’s National Library on Vajpayeeji’s birth anniversary, Samikda reached out to the old guard and said, ‘We all belong to the same parivar, so let’s do this together’.”
There were party workers who had been sidelined or had been denied responsibility, different people had different grouses; Bhattacharya brought all of them together. The task at hand, insiders point out, was not easy but Bhattacharya was earnest and he had the support of the BJP’s national general secretary Sunil Bansal.
People like Ritesh Tiwari, Banerjee himself and Dilip Ghosh now emerged out of political penumbra. And if Bhattacharya had reservations about the other heavyweight in the party, he kept them to himself.
“Samikda never makes personal attacks,” says a party source. “Within the party, here in Bengal, he has a loyal following.” They are referred to as “Samikda’s people”. And this following has not come overnight, he adds.
Every time he was asked why Suvendu Adhikari as CM and not him, Bhattacharya replied sometimes with humour, “Look at me, do I look like someone who can run fast enough for the CM’s post?” At other times directly, “The party fought the election projecting Suvendu as the face. Who else can become chief minister but the man who defeated Mamata Banerjee twice?”
The buzz is that pre-election Bhattacharya had made friendly overtures on behalf of the BJP to the CPM and Congress supporters, and party workers in West Bengal. “Set aside political differences and join forces to oust the oppressive Trinamool government. It is the only way to reclaim your political identity and ideology,” he had urged.
Others in Bengal’s political circles — Bhattacharya has cordial relations with politicians across party lines — draw attention to how he connected with the educated Bengali middle class in an idiom familiar to them. His references to literary and cultural touchstones reassured a votebank that had always treated the BJP with suspicion. He was the first BJP president to start gifting national leaders like PM Modi and Amit Shah portraits of Bengali icons such as Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra, Satyajit Ray.
That day while driving down to Howrah, when I ask him what was it really that had made him sure of the Trinamool’s defeat, he says, “When thousands of people, including women cutting across political identities, stepped out of their homes to participate in the Reclaim the Night movement after the RG Kar incident, it was not a message to us. It was a message from the people of Bengal that the Trinamool government was not going to survive.”
Two weeks after the BJP has come to power in Bengal, it still makes sense to dwell on Bhattacharya’s pre-election strategy. Party insiders say Adhikari is in the hot seat but Bhattacharya’s eye is on the steering, guiding the government on behalf of the party high command as well as the RSS. As one BJP leader put it, “The Suvendu-Samik coordination is like the Sehwag-Sachin partnership in cricket. Like Sehwag, Suvenduda will score quickly with sixes and boundaries, while Samikda, like Sachin, will quietly anchor the innings.”
Post May 4, when hundreds of Trinamool workers were said to have picked up BJP flags, smeared themselves with saffron gulal and hit the streets shouting “Jai Shri Ram”, targeting their own leaders and party offices, it was Bhattacharya who directed party workers to guard all Trinamool offices and report if any BJP member was found involved in the violence.
If it was optics, it made for a different sort of optics. Amit Shah’s orders, true, but delivered in classic Vajpayee style.
Except that it was not just optics. BJP secretary of Kolkata North Suburban organisational district Nitya Maitra says, “Before the election, we spent sleepless nights fearing the Trinamool. After the polls, we are spending sleepless nights trying to stop the Trinamool party workers from becoming BJP members. We monitored the situation till 11pm every night.” In the last fortnight, nearly 50 BJP workers have been showcaused for anti-party activities.
The challenge, however, was not limited to the lowest common denominators. Trinamool councillors and panchayat functionaries started approaching BJP leaders seeking to join the party. Is that phase now over? Replies Bhattacharya, “I am still struggling. Our entire party is trying to prevent this.”
Bhattacharya does not use the words “party” and “government” interchangeably. He tells me, “There was no difference between the party and the government during the Trinamool regime. Even in the Left Front era, the separating line was very thin. Our vision is to make that line thicker and show people how the party and government can function autonomously while maintaining proper coordination.” And what if that cannot be sustained? His reply, “That will never happen.”
A party leader says by way of footnote, “In all the BJP states, the chief ministers take major policy decisions only after they have been cleared by the organisational head.”
It seems one of the other things Bhattacharya has been tasked with is what the BJP calls “restoring Bengal’s political culture”. Decoded, it is basically a reference to the corrupt practices of a section of Trinamool politicians and a warning to BJP workers not to go down the same path.
Can Samik Bhattacharya ensure that? “We cannot be 100 per cent free from deviation, corruption and lapses. There will always be some such people. But I can guarantee you that the organisational structure is strong enough to automatically isolate and remove them. It is not I but the system itself that will drive them out,” he says hinting at multiple layers of monitoring within the organisation.
The BJP, once the principal Opposition, is now the ruling dispensation in Bengal. Having secured 46 per cent votes in the 2026 elections, it now needs an expansion plan. And yet, it has blocked the entry of outsiders to maintain internal equilibrium.
Says Bhattacharya, “We cannot manufacture political leaders like Kumartuli churns out idols. The party will induct people but only after robust verification.” He continues, “But first we shall reach out to those who were not traditional BJP supporters but voted for us to remove the Trinamool, and convince them through governance.”
The ground whisper is that the apparent tempering of the new government’s “gag order” for government officials is courtesy Bhattacharya’s intervention. Bhattacharya, however, is emphatic: “The government put out the order and the government reconsidered it. I had nothing to do with it.”
According to new and updated definitions of the word catalyst, it is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction without itself being consumed by it. Catalysts also have a property called selectivity; it enables them to direct a reaction to increase the amount of desired product, reduce the amount of unwanted byproducts and sometimes produce entirely new materials with new potential uses. Just saying.