Knives Out? All Eyes on Dilip Ghosh vs Suvendu Adhikari in Bengal BJP's First Post-Results Meet Today
Supporters of both Dilip Ghosh and Suvendhu Adhikari want them to throw their hats in the ring for the post of West Bengal BJP president. (PTI Photos)
Undesired election results often bring chaos into the open. The Congress has been facing it for the better part of 10 years now. And ever since the 2024 Lok Sabha election results, the BJP is getting a taste of it too – in Tamil Nadu where supporters of Tamilisai Soundararajan and K Annamalai roughed each other up and in Uttar Pradesh where Sanjeev Balyan and Sangeet Som were embroiled in a war of words.
Now, the long-simmering tensions in Bengal BJP have spilled out into the open, with its former state president Dilip Ghosh and Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari training guns at each other without naming one another ever since the party’s tally dropped from 18 seats to 12 in a state where it had set an ambitious target to bag 30 of 42 Lok Sabha seats.
The BJP was so certain of achieving its Mission 25 that it upgraded its target to Mission 30. Now with 12 seats in its kitty and speculation that the Trinamool Congress is gearing up to whisk away a faction of the state BJP, simmering tension between Ghosh and Adhikari are becoming a public spectacle.
It is against this background that the Bengal BJP’s core group will meet for the first time post-results on Saturday and the two sides will face each other in a room. A total of 24 members are expected to be present, including Sukanta Majumdar, state BJP president who is now also a Union Minister. But all eyes will be on two individuals when the meeting kicks off at 6 pm.
DILIP GHOSH: STAR IN REBELLION
Purely by numbers, Dilip Ghosh has been the most successful Bengal BJP president, delivering 18 seats for the party in 2019 elections — the highest to date. So when his seat was unceremoniously changed in the middle of the campaigning season from Medinipur to far away Bardhaman-Durgapur, it surprised not just him but many even in the rival TMC.
In 2019, the BJP had barely won the seat by a slim margin of 3,000-odd votes. “It is no secret that I have been removed from Medinipur under a conspiracy,” Ghosh said.
Air-dropped into a new terrain with unfamiliar cadres and new demography, Ghosh lost the seat by more than 1.37 lakh votes to TMC’s Kirti Azad. Adding insult to injury, his previous seat Medinipur has also been snatched by the TMC.
After the results, Ghosh infamously said: “I did not lose. The BJP has lost. To make me lose, they also had to lose the Medinipur Lok Sabha seat.”
While Ghosh did not elaborate on who scripted the “conspiracy” or who had to “lose”, contextual reasoning leads to Suvendu Adhikari.
SUVENDU ADHIKARI: THE FAVOURITE PUNCHING BAG
Suvendu Adhikari, who switched to the BJP in December 2020 at an Amit Shah rally, has only become more powerful with each passing year. He is seen to be the “eyes and ears” of the BJP’s central leadership when it comes to West Bengal affairs, regardless of many senior BJP leaders’ hostility towards him.
After the 2021 West Bengal Assembly election results, when the BJP fared well with 77 seats but a far cry from ‘200 paar’, Adhikari became the face of the opposition with the LoP position in the Assembly. His critics say he also had the final say on ticket distribution before the party’s CEC (Central Election Committee) took the decision.
Now, not just Ghosh but even Saumitra Khan, one of BJP’s 12 MPs, has been firing salvos at Adhikari without naming him. Khan has made a strong allegation that “some may have entered into connivance with the TMC”. During his stint in the TMC, Adhikari was a close aide of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and kept the Nandigram agitation pot boiling for her. BJP’s Bankura MLA Niladri Shekhar Dana also raised questions over “leadership” in the state.
Facing flak, Adhikari defended himself saying: “When things go right and results are in our favour, they take credit. But when electoral performance is not up to the mark, they blame me.”
WHY TIMING IS CRUCIAL?
With Sukanta Majumdar, a well-mannered professor who was keeping the seat warm so far, being brought to Delhi, the question of the next BJP president arises. While it is too early to speculate with BJP’s central leadership awaiting similar rejig, supporters of both Ghosh and Adhikari want them to throw their hats in the ring.
Dilip Ghosh posted a cryptic tweet on X that simply read: “Old is Gold”. Adhikari, too, would prefer a shot at the top post, accumulating more power. Saturday’s meeting comes at such a juncture when the ‘old’ guard and the ‘new’ guard will face each other in a room at the BJP office in Kolkata.
Adhikari, too, has been making comments that are reason enough for the central leadership to be worried. He said that regardless of what Mamata Banerjee has done, the people of the state have accepted her. Adhikari added that this is precisely why she is getting 45% vote share, a comment that can be construed as pro-Mamata.
Adhikari isn’t factually wrong. According to Election Commission data, TMC received 45.76% of votes in West Bengal, while the BJP managed 38.73%. This gap of 7% ensured the TMC won 17 more Lok Sabha seats in the state.
But the fact that he is quoting this fact itself adds a dimension to the intra-BJP squabble in the state.