Back in the spotlight
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s national general-secretary, Sunil Bansal, is back in the spotlight for his behind-the-scenes role in strengthening the organisation in Bengal as the party’s principal state minder. On his first visit to Delhi after assuming office, the chief minister of Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari, made it a point to meet Bansal and publicly praise his contribution. “Your strategic guidance in strengthening the organisation down to the booth level in West Bengal and infusing new energy among the workers has been unparalleled,” Adhikari wrote on X after their meeting at the BJP headquarters. The public endorsement has renewed attention on Bansal, a former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak and close aide of the Union home minister, Amit Shah. As the BJP’s organisational secretary in Uttar Pradesh from 2014 to 2022, he was widely credited with building the party’s formidable election machinery and scripting a series of electoral successes. Bansal’s growing clout in UP, however, reportedly led to friction with the CM, Yogi Adityanath, as he emerged as a parallel power centre. In 2022, he was elevated to BJP national general-secretary and moved out of UP. With UP due for assembly elections early next year, Bansal’s rising profile has triggered speculation that he could be assigned a key role in the state again, potentially reopening old fault lines with Adityanath.
Mover and shaker
The claim by KV Thomas, Kerala’s former special representative in Delhi under the Left government, that individuals close to the Tamil Nadu CM, C Joseph Vijay, had approached him about becoming Tamil Nadu’s special representative created quite a flutter in Kerala. He also said that states like Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab have extended invitations to him to become their special representative. Thomas’ influence in the corridors of power helped him bring the Union finance minister, Nirmala Sitaraman, to Kerala House in New Delhi last year. Thomas, a former Union minister of consumer affairs, food and public distribution, had a long five-decade innings in Delhi. Apparently, he had no qualms in lobbying to spread his wings to other states with the help of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s gen-sec, MA Baby.
Politics of praise
The visit of the BJP president, Nitin Nabin, to Bhubaneswar last week saw all the stalwarts of the party, including the Union ministers, Dharmendra Pradhan and Jual Oram, the BJP MP, Baijayant Panda, and the Odisha legislative assembly Speaker, Surama Padhy, make a desperate attempt to ensure they did not get left behind in welcoming Nabin. Aware of the party’s internal politics, CM Mohan Charan Majhi, under pressure for his government’s performance over the last two years, worked hard to stay in Nabin’s good books. The CM personally received Nabin at the airport and spent the following day attending each of Nabin’s meetings. He even accompanied Nabin during his Puri visit. Critics questioned Majhi’s gesture. However, his effort paid off. Before leaving for Delhi, Nabin praised the Majhi government — an endorsement the CM had been keen to secure.
Newfound respect
The Assam CM, Himanta Biswa Sarma, inaugurated the 2.8-kilometre-long Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Flyover in Guwahati. He said the flyover — worth Rs 376 crore — is a tribute to the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the BJP’s ideological predecessor, because of his role in preventing Assam from becoming part of Pakistan during Partition and for establishing Assamese as the language for school education in the state when he was the vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta. Sarma took to social media to share in detail why people should know about Mookerjee. His contributions were also mentioned in detail in the government statement on the inauguration. Sarma said commuters “will be travelling over a piece of history that Dr. SP Mookerjee, more than most, helped preserve for us”. He added that Mookerjee “treated Assam as central to India’s idea of itself. Not as a peripheral frontier or a forgotten corner but as a region whose people, language & land were inseparable from Maa Bharti.”
A political observer pointed out that, until now, Gopinath Bordoloi, the state’s first CM, was credited with preventing Assam from becoming part of Pakistan. Now Bordoloi has company, he said, referring to Sarma’s tweet where he states that everyone in Assam, especially the next generation, should know that the “very fact of being able to call themselves Indian today, to be able to study in their language, practice their faith and be in their motherland, is owed to stalwarts such as S.P. Mookerjee and Gopinath Bordoloi”. A BJP-led coalition first came to power in Assam in 2016 but Mookerjee’s contributions have been flagged like never before only in the third term. One wonders whether the recent win in Bengal could have anything to do with this renewed attention to Mookerjee.