Union home minister Amit Shah and BJP national president J.P. Nadda formed a 15-member poll management committee last Tuesday, but given the shape of the organisation and factionalism in the Bengal BJP unit, several party leaders doubt if the initiative is enough to add 35 Lok Sabha seats to Narendra Modi’s basket from the state.

Publicly, party functionaries are not ready to speak about their doubts. In private, several of them admit that the bigger battle for the state BJP is to make the warring factions come together to put up a united fight.

The Shah-Nadda duo have packed the new committee with key faces Dilip Ghosh, Rahul Sinha, Sukanta Majumdar and Suvendu Adhikari. But the question doing rounds in the state BJP is whether these leaders would be able to team up to fight Trinamul in Bengal.

“Naddaji got the rivals together but it has been done without addressing the rift between them. That prompted Amitji to step in and issue a stern message urging the warring leaders to come together and work cohesively for the Lok Sabha elections,” a senior BJP leader said on the condition of anonymity.

Last Tuesday, Shah held a meeting with selected leaders at a New Town hotel, and separate parleys with Majumdar and Adhikari. A source in the BJP said: “The Union home minister told the duo that he didn’t want to know if Rahul-ji or Dilip-ji is good or bad but if we lose even one seat from Bengal then the party cannot achieve the national target of 400 seats”.

The source added that Shah stressed Ghosh’s role in the 2019 elections when Bengal added 18 MPs to the party’s kitty. By speaking his mind in the presence of Nadda, Shah made it clear that the BJP high command was not giving any importance to the complaints against Ghosh.

“In the last two years, both Majumdar and Adhikari made several complaints against Dilip Ghosh but by asking Dilip-da to take a first-row seat during the meeting, Amitji made it clear what he wants the Bengal leadership to do,” the source said.

“Dilip Ghosh has the experience of giving the party 18 seats from Bengal and all should work together,” Shah is said to have told the Bengal team.

Differences between Ghosh and Majumdar are no longer a party secret. According to an insider, the emergence of Majumdar and Adhikari as key figures in steering the BJP’s state unit since September 2021 left both Sinha and Ghosh marginalised.

Recently, their rooms at the party’s state headquarters in Calcutta were demolished for renovation without their knowledge. The party was embarrassed when Ghosh told reporters that he should have given prior notice before his office was pulled down.

If infighting within the party’s state leadership is cause for worry, the district units are no better. Organisational changes implemented by the Bengal unit of the BJP since August have led to internal conflicts and factionalism in various districts.

In October, BJP workers from Barasat in North 24-Parganas had turned up outside the party’s Salt Lake office to protest against the appointment of a few district office-bearers on the charge that they were “Trinamul stooges”.

“We do not want Tarun Ghosh as the new Barasat unit chief because of his proximity to Trinamul. If people like him get crucial posts, the BJP can’t put up a united fight in the Lok Sabha polls,” a protester had said.

BJP state spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya condemned the protest and said “indiscipline would not be tolerated”.

Recently, some BJP supporters set afire posters with pictures of Majumdar, party’s general secretary (organisation), Amitabha Chakraborty, and co-minder Amit Malviya outside the party’s Calcutta headquarters. They claimed old-timers were being marginalised. Members of the BJP south Calcutta unit wrote to Nadda their concern about sidelining Ghosh and Sinha.

In September, Junior Union minister Subhas Sarkar found himself locked for over an hour inside a district party office in Bankura by around 50 BJP workers protesting against his dictatorial attitude and blaming him for the BJP’s poor show in last year’s local civic polls and this year’s rural polls.

Sarkar had to summon the state police to rescue him from the enraged party workers.

The BJP won both the Bankura and Bishnupur Lok Sabha seats in 2019. It bagged eight out of 12 Assembly seats in 2021 in Bankura despite the Mamata sweep across the state.

“Perhaps such protests worked on the minds of Shah and Nadda. Sarkar and three other Union ministers in Bengal were left out of the committee,” a state BJP leader said.

Organisational conflict among party officials, particularly in Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, and North Dinajpur in north Bengal, and North 24-Parganas, Murshidabad, Nadia, Bankura, South 24-Parganas and Calcutta, does not augur well in the run-up to the 2024 polls, said sources.