New Bengal BJP chief Samik Bhattacharya set off the conversation with three names — Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Acharya Debaprasad Ghosh and Haripada Bharati.
Mookerjee is considered the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which evolved into the BJP in 1980; Ghosh and Bharati were prominent leaders who helped the Sangh grow in Bengal.
Samik naming the three Bengalis was not without reason: it was to buttress his positioning of the BJP as a Bengal party.
“The Jana Sangh was rooted in the Bengal ethos.… Acharya Debabrata Ghosh was its national president and Bengal unit chief.… No other party here is as truly Bengali and Bengal’s own as ours,” he claimed during a chat at his Salt Lake home.
Samik recounted the role of Mookerjee and his associates during and after the August 1946 Calcutta Killings, a dark chapter the BJP has resuscitated to sow fear in Hindu minds in poll-bound Bengal.
Samik’s desperation to portray his party as a Bengal party owes to the ghosts of 2021, when Mamata Banerjee’s bohiragoto (outsider) tag sunk the BJP.
“I was born in Assam. There was a time when the BJP in Assam was labelled a Bengali party, while in Bengal it was called the party of Marwaris.… The narrative has been successfully countered in Assam. Here too, I will change it,” Samik said.
To “reestablish” the Bengali link, the BJP has consciously installed a cultured, RSS-tinged bhadralok at the state unit’s helm.
Immediate challenges
“The BJP never had an urban base in Bengal, it was always in rural areas,” Samik said.
He narrated an anecdote to outline how he wants to achieve what has eluded the party since its Jana Sangh days.
“Jana Sangh leader Harikishan Tandon once requested Atal Bihari Vajpayee to address a rally for a candidate fighting the Calcutta Corporation polls from a northwestern Calcutta ward,” he said.
“To Tandon’s plea, Atalji replied, ‘Tumhara district, maane oi Burrabazar (Your district, that is Burrabazar)? You better lose the polls but try to win from Bengali areas’.”
One of Samik’s challenges is that the party’s national leadership includes no Bengali.
“Apart from strengthening the party, he now has the added responsibility to ensure that senior leaders like Amit Shah avoid a repeat of the 2020 gaffes,” a BJP leader said.
Shah had during a trip to Bankura garlanded the statue of an unknown tribal hunter, mistaking it for an image of tribal hero Birsa Munda.
Many other north Indian BJP campaigners made similar bloopers, some relating to Rabindranath Tagore, allowing Trinamool to successfully paint them as “outsiders” with scant respect for Bengal’s history or culture.
“The way the outsider tag should have been confronted, we failed to do that,” Samik acknowledged.
He has done away with the flexes of the party’s top leaders — mostly north Indians — from the party offices at 6 Murlidhar Sen Lane and in Salt Lake, replacing them with one carrying the party’s lotus symbol.
“People in Bengal do not like the politics of cut-outs. This is a north Indian culture,” Samik said.
He is being careful not to rub non-Bengalis the wrong way in his enthusiasm to associate the party with Bengal.
“The contribution of non-Bengalis cannot be obliterated. They played a major role in arming Hindus (during the Calcutta Killings).… This (Trinamool) narrative of bohiragoto will also hurt Bengal’s migrant labourers,” he said.
Pandering to what he believes is the Bengali’s political sensibilities, Samik seems willing even to deprioritise his party’s usual Islamophobic, hard-line Hindutva.
“It doesn’t mean he does not subscribe to that school of thought. Only, he has the common sense to see that the politics of the cow belt is unlikely to yield dividends in Bengal, where one in three voters is a Muslim,” a party colleague deemed close to Samik said.
Culture gap
Mindful of the links with Bengal’s culture clan that the Left and Trinamool have cultivated, Samik was left ruing the passing of Bharati over four decades ago.
“Haripada Bharati taught at Howrah’s Narasingha Dutta College and was a brilliant orator. His sudden death (in 1982) dealt a blow to the party’s appeal among educated Bengalis,” he said.
Samik’s elevation as state unit chief is itself partly an attempt to close the gap.
After all, he can quote Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay from memory; he has watched all the great plays the Calcutta theatre has served up since the days of Shambhu Mitra, Utpal Dutt and Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay; and he can hold forth on the cinema of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen.
Yet, when in doubt, he inevitably brings up the “Great” Calcutta Killings.
To many, his inclinations might seem contradictory; yet the party believes the 61-year-old’s saffron-tinged worldview and distinct Bengali traits provide the best mix to rejuvenate the beleaguered state unit with months left for the Assembly elections.
Samik’s packed bookshelves shed ample light on his intellectual eclecticism. Besides the Constitution and virtually every major book by every giant of Bengali literature, they contain, for instance, Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, J. Sai Deepak’s India, that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution, Shashi Tharoor’s Pax Indica, and B.H. Liddell Hart’s A History of the First World War.
There’s a copy also of Reader in Marxist Philosophy: From the Writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, by Howard Selsam and Harry Martel. A reference to this drew a sarcastic smile from the new state BJP president.
“Know thy enemy,” Samik said, quoting from ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
‘Not against Muslims’
Samik, the ojatoshotru (one with no enemies), who began his journey with the RSS aged seven from Mandirtala in Howrah, seems to grasp Bengal’s inclusive ethos better than most in his party.
While leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari’s militant Hindutva has dismayed sections of the party, RSS sources said Samik was expected to clarify the path the Bengal BJP intends to take on the Muslim question.
Asked if his middle path might work in Bengal, Samik said: “We are always fully committed to sarva dharma sama bhav (equal respect forall religions)….
“We are against minoritarianism, not minorities. We are against West Asia-influenced radicalisation through the religious fascism of sections of Muslims — vast as they are — but not against Muslims.”
He claims the BJP received Muslim votes in the past, and had “achieved victories in several Muslim-dominated panchayats… from Murshidabad to Birbhum”.
“We are simply urging a rethink among Muslims. Don’t vote for us, but know that our fight is not against you. We are against your poverty, against your misuse for petty electoral gains…,” he said.
“In the past few years, over 90 per cent of political deaths in Bengal were of Muslims, and most of the killers were Muslim too…. Muslims have been reduced to killing Muslims in Mamata’s Bengal.”
Samik vs Suvendu
Samik is expected to rebuild booth-level strength, bring in discipline and introduce teamwork between the legislature party (led by Trinamool turncoat Suvendu) and the party organisation.
Can he unite the party?
“I don’t have to do it; our party’s vast ocean of ideology will bring everyone together…. Some creases need to be ironed out, but they are minor. Give it a month or less,”he said.
Can the contrast between Suvendu’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and Samik’s moderate approach not confuse voters?
Samik asserted: “The party line is the same — what Suvendu Adhikari says and what I say are the same message, just in different packaging.”
A senior BJP leader said Samik’s success would be decided by how he “manages the Suvendu Adhikari-Dilip Ghosh equation down to micro-level district lobbies and brings them together in such a short time”.
If BJP wins
If the BJP wins power in Bengal, what will its priorities in governance be?
“The restoration of democracy, of law and order. Re-industrialisation and the generation of an investment-friendly, pro-business atmosphere. The alleviation of poverty. And stopping the relentless outflow of labour, capital and merit,” is Samik’s answer.
But can the BJP really come to power?
Samik responded with a silent, cryptic smile.
After a longish pause, he said: “The people have decided with finality to end the current nightmare of a regime. They want to ensure West Bengal does not becomeWest Bangladesh.”