Around a dozen BJP workers surrounded state party president Dilip Ghosh at the district office in Hooghly’s Chinsurah on Friday, demanding the removal of district president Goutam Chatterjee and Dipanjan Guha, a state secretary who unsuccessfully contested the last Assembly polls from Chandernagore.

Angry BJP workers alleged that promoting leaders who were hand-in-glove with the Trinamul at the cost of old-timers had led to the party’s debacle. Demanding the removal of the leaders, the workers asked Ghosh to form a new district committee.

“The district president and the state secretary are responsible for the defeat. They were hand in gloves with Trinamul and had fielded candidates without any background. So, today we had come to the party office to demand removal of the district president,” said an agitating BJP worker.

Chatterjee took over as district president in 2020 by removing Subir Nag, a move that had angered BJP old-timers.

The district had faced a series of protests over selection of candidates and a central leader was gheraoed in Singur after the party decided to field Trinamul turncoat Rabindranath Bhattacharjee as the BJP nominee from Singur.

Ghosh had arrived for a meeting at the district party office in Chinsurah on Friday afternoon. The BJP workers surrounded Ghosh when he was leaving the office after the meeting.

“You have come here to lodge a complaint with me but you never came to my office to inform me about this. The party has a decorum and come to my office to tell me about your allegations,” Ghosh told angry party workers.

BJP district president Chatterjee later told reporters that Ghosh had asked him to suspend all those who had demonstrated on Friday.

Mukul wife

BJP MLA Mukul Roy on Friday said no one from the BJP state committee had enquired about the health of his wife Krishna Roy even while Trinamul MP and de-facto number two in the party Abhishek Banerjee visited the hospital and then Prime Minister Narendra Modi called him up.

“I did not know when he (Dilip Ghosh) came to see her...No one from the state committee had taken any update in this regard,” Roy said.

Ghosh, however, said it was not possible to call on Covid patients and that was the reason for not going to meet Mukul's wife. He added that for the same reason no one had visited him when he had contracted the disease last year.

“However, when I heard that she was seriously ill and on life support I went to the hospital. I got worried when I heard that Abhishek had gone to see her. One should be thankful that he came to see her,” said Ghosh.

Additional reporting by Snehamoy Chakraborty