In a fresh salvo at the BJP leadership, former MP Dilip Ghosh claimed that the party knows how to launch movements but lost the key to conduct elections and fetch votes for its candidates.

The former West Bengal state president of the BJP said if the leadership wants to hear his opinion, he is ready to share it with them.

“The BJP leadership certainly knows how to build up the organization, they know how to launch a movement. But we don’t know about electioneering, we don’t know how to get votes for the party. We seem to have lost the key, the formula to get more votes required to win seats,” he said.

Ghosh’s observation came following the party’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha elections in the state this year. The BJP won 12 of the total 42 constituencies, six less than what it had bagged in 2019. He himself also lost while contesting from a new seat.

“We won 77 seats in the 2021 Assembly polls though we had set the target of crossing the 100-mark. But our hopes did not materialize,” the BJP leader said at a party meeting.

“I air my views when asked at a party forum. It is up to the leadership to act on my suggestions,” said Ghosh who had won from the Midnapore Lok Sabha constituency in 2019.

He told PTI that he has never been disconnected with the grass root level BJP workers who are facing alleged TMC terrors in their areas, during and after the election.

Ghosh, an RSS pracharak who had been picked up by the BJP leadership in 2014 to be appointed as General Secretary and made West Bengal unit President in 2015, conceded defeat by a big margin to TMC’s Kirti Azad in Durgapur-Bardhaman seat in last Lok Sabha polls.

He had then accused a section of the state leadership of conspiring against him leading to his defeat. Ghosh had also publicly voiced his displeasure for being forced to shift from his familiar turf in Midnapore to relatively unknown Burdwan-Durgapur.

TMC leader Kunal Ghosh said Ghosh’s words are expressions of the growing frustration among state BJP since their hope of getting a high number of seats in the Lok Sabha polls has been punctured.

“Dilip Ghosh is putting the onus on the BJP’s election machinery as they have no other excuse to offer. They cannot digest the fact that the BJP is a non-entity to the people of Bengal,” the former TMC Rajya Sabha MP claimed.

Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Telegraph Online staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.