Union home minister Amit Shah and BJP national president J.P. Nadda on Tuesday set the ball rolling for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Bengal by setting up a 15-member election committee.
The committee drew attention as it included sidelined party veterans like Dilip Ghosh and Rahul Sinha and left out four Union ministers from the state.
“Today, along with National President Shri JPNadda Ji, I held a meeting of the BJP core group in Kolkata and discussed the strategies for the upcoming election. The people of Bengal trust PM Modi Ji and are all set to bless the BJP in 2024 Lok Sabha elections with 35 seats,” Shah wrote on his X handle shortly after he met several Bengal BJP leaders at a hotel in New Town on Tuesday.
Shah had set the ambitious target of 35 seats in Bengal — the state has 42 parliamentary seats in all — at a public rally Suri in Birbhum earlier in April this year. The statement on X on Tuesday iterated it again.
To achieve the ambitious 35-seat target, Shah and Nadda formed the poll management committee that reflected a mix of old and young.
Apart from the quartet of Ghosh, Sinha, state BJP president Sukanata Majumdar and leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Suvendu Adhikari, the others included Locket Chatterjee, Jyotirmoy Singh Mahato, Agnimitra Paul, Amitabha Chakraborti, Jagannath Chattopadhyay and Dipak Barman.
Central leaders Asha Lakra, Amit Malviya, Sunil Bansal, Mangal Pandey and Satish Dhand have also been made part of the team to coordinate with state-level leaders.
To keep a tab on party activities on the ground, the poll management committee has been asked to send reports to Delhi every week, said a source.
Through the poll committee, Shah and Nadda sent a clear message to the party's Bengal unit that it had to focus on the organisational strength on the ground to reach out to as many people as possible to be able to ensure the state BJP unit's target of 35 for the Lok Sabha polls is met.
A BJP leader said the inclusion of two former state party presidents Rahul Sinha and Dilip Ghosh was the most striking outcome of the day as it showed that the Shah-Nadda duo had faith in them although the present state unit had in recent times sidelined the veterans.
"With Dilipda at the helm, we had won 18 Lok Sabha seats. However, he was replaced with Sukanta (Majumdar) in September 2021 after we performed below expectations in the 2021 Assembly polls. By keeping them (Ghosh and Sinha) in the 15-member team, the top duo sent the message that the central leadership would not encourage factionalism and use the two senior leaders for their organisational skills," the BJP leader added.
At present, Ghosh and Sinha do not hold any organisational position in the party.
Ghosh was the party's state president from 2015 to 2021 and played a pivotal role in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls when the BJP won an unprecedented 18 seats in Bengal with some 40 per cent vote share. Since then the vote share of the BJP dropped in successive polls and two BJP MPs have since defected to Trinamul amid questions on whether the saffron camp is weakening in the state.
Ghosh was made a BJP national vice-president after his tenure as the state president ended. In July this year, he was removed from the post and is simply now the party's MP from Midnapore.
Sinha, who was Bengal BJP's president from 2009 to 2015, was appointed as a national secretary earlier but at present doesn't hold any post in the state or Centre.
A source said that ever since Majumdar and Adhikari got into the helm of affairs of the BJP's state unit here, both Sinha and Ghosh have been sidelined and cornered.
Even the rooms of Ghosh and Sinha at the party's state headquarters at 6, Murlidhar Sen Lane were demolished, without their knowledge, apparently for renovation.
The non-inclusion of four junior ministers from Bengal — Nisith Pramanik, John Barla, Subhas Sarkar, and Shantanu Thakur or former minister and organiser Debashree Chowdhury — from the poll committee was also a topic of debate in the party's circles.
A BJP leader said that Thakur's exclusion meant there was no Matua representative in the poll committee, which was "surprising".
“The Matua community had backed the BJP in the 2019 polls when the party had won 18 seats,” the leader said.
Responding to the implied criticism, a member of the newly formed committee said that it was a core panel under which several other teams would work.
Apart from addressing the issue of factionalism, the Shah-Nadda duo told the state leaders that they should concentrate on reaching out to the people instead of depending on central leaders to turn the people's mood in favour of the BJP in the polls, a source said.
"A lot of leaders are concentrating on probable arrests of rival Trinamul leaders by central agencies over charges of corruption. Both Shah and Nadda wanted Bengal leaders of the BJP to ensure the party grew on its own rather than be helped by external agencies," the source added.
Sounding the poll bugle, the two visiting BJP leaders also asked every party leader, including MLAs, to be prepared to contest Lok Sabha polls.
This, the party source said, was a clear hint that the party could field BJP big shots, including senior MLAs, in the Lok Sabha elections.
The central leadership also made it clear that Bengal was key to the BJP's target to return Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power for a third term with over 400 seats and it would not allow any slackness on the part of the state leadership of the party in this regard.
Besides holding the organisational meetings with party leaders, Shah and Nadda visited two gurdwaras and the city’s famous Kalighat temple.