The former BJP state president of Bengal, Dilip Ghosh was some 41 kms away at Howrah’s Tantiberia on Sunday afternoon when Amit Shah, the second most-powerful man in the Union government and the BJP was in Kolkata addressing party workers.
Ghosh’s absence from Shah’s meeting barely three days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi sounded the poll bugle for next year’s Assembly polls in Bengal from distant Alipurduar has set the tongues inside and outside the BJP.
“The Sangh helps shape individuals into responsible citizens, instilling in them a respect for Indian culture and a deep sense of dedication to the nation,” said Ghosh on Sunday. “It creates ideal citizens – Swayamsevaks – who continue to work successfully across various fields in the country.”
Sunday was the concluding ceremony of the first-year of the RSS’ Sangh Shiksha Varg, which Ghosh attended instead of Shah’s meet.
Ghosh has said he wasn’t invited for Shah’s meeting held at the Netaji Indoor stadium. He was also not invited for Modi’s visit to Alipurduar, where the Prime Minister shared the dais with the Bengal BJP president and junior union minister Sukanta Majumdar and the leader of Opposition, Suvendu Adhikari.
The distance between the Bengal BJP and now even Deen Dayal Upadhyay marg has widened since Ghosh’s removal from the post of the party’s Bengal unit president in 2021.
Ghosh, responsible for the party’s gaining electoral heft in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, had to pay the price for the 2021 debacle.
The BJP is looking for a president and the 2019 Lok Sabha results in Ghosh’s resume makes him among the frontrunners. His personal equation with Adhikari, the most powerful man in the state BJP, who has the ears of both Modi and Shah, has been prickly.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Ghosh played a captain’s innings winning not his own seat Midnapore with a margin of 88, 972 votes while ensuring the BJP dealt a body blow to the Trinamool in both north and south Bengal, with its highest tally of 18 seats ever from the state.
Five years later Ghosh was nominated from the Burdwan-Durgapur Lok Sabha seat and lost.
For his ouster from Midnapore, Ghosh has held Adhikary responsible. The Adhikary family, right from their days in the Congress led by the patriarch Sisir, to the Trinamool and now BJP, has called the shots in Midnapore, even when the Left was its heftiest organisation-wise.
Ghosh stationed at Midnapore posed a challenge to the Adhikarys of Contai, around 106 kms away.
He is also unhappy with Majumdar, the incumbent state unit president, for not following in his footsteps in leading the party. Right now Ghosh is a man with followers, but no friends in the BJP.
His late marriage with a party colleague last month also did not go down well with either the Sangh, of whom he has been a follower since his student days or the party’s central leadership. The marriage was soon followed by a trip to the just-inaugurated Jagannath temple at Digha where he met the chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
That visit was the last straw for the Bengal BJP leadership. The party’s state leadership made it clear they did not endorse his meeting with Mamata.
Last year, after the BJP failed to retain the seats it had won in the 2019 Lok Sabha from Bengal, and instead suffered heavy losses, an attempt was made for a rapprochement between Adhikary and Ghosh.
Early this year, on Adhikary’s invitation Ghosh had even addressed the party MLAs before the Assembly session. Given Ghosh’s experience with the organisation and his success, Adhikary was believed to be pushing for the former president to be reappointed ahead of next year’s Assembly polls.
The meeting with Mamata is believed to have brought about the rift once again, though Ghosh insists his loyalty to the Sangh and the BJP cannot be questioned.
While the central leadership still struggles to find a new face to lead the party in the crucial Assembly polls, Ghosh’s minor acts of transgression are only adding to the disarray in the party.
