The BJP in Cooch Behar district is confronting a fresh challenge as thousands of people who have become homeless and lost their crops in a storm on Sunday evening are irked with party MLAs over their alleged inaction after the calamity.

The homeless families, most of whom make a living out of farming, are not even ready to let the MLAs visit their places and shooed some of them away. The discontentment is brewing ahead of the proposed visit of Union home minister Amit Shah to north Bengal in the first week of May.

Shah is likely to hold a public meeting in Siliguri and visit the Tinbigha corridor on the India-Bangladesh border in Cooch Behar.

According to BJP insiders, one of the key objectives of the home minister’s visit is to try and consolidate the party’s support base in north Bengal, where it has seven MPs and 30 MLAs.

“The central leadership is recasting its focus on north Bengal. It is definitely a matter of concern for us to see that a considerable section of voters in at least five Assembly constituencies of Cooch Behar are peeved with our MLAs,” said a BJP insider.

Around 3,000 houses were completely damaged and 4,000 homes partially destroyed in the storm. The homeless families are staying in relief shelters or in makeshift tents and banking on the relief provided by the block administration concerned.

Kshudiram Barman, a resident of Cooch Behar 1 block, who lost his house, is irked with MLA Nikhil Ranjan Dey (of Cooch Behar south seat).

“We lost everything overnight but the MLA didn’t turn up to help us. A couple of days ago, we heard that he would visit our place to take stock of the situation. We asked him not to come as we don’t want empty assurances,” said Barman.

Tufanganj BJP MLA Malati Rava also faced protests when she went to some storm-affected areas in her constituency.

“We told her to leave as she didn’t stand by us during the hour of crisis. We voted for her but it was local Trinamul workers who helped us salvage our belongings and provided us with food and shelter on the same night,” said Samar Das, a resident of Tufanganj.

The BJP MLAs, however, countered the charge and said Trinamul supporters were stopping them from reaching the affected people. “Trinamul is doing it in a planned manner. The party is also doing politics over distribution of relief,” said Dey.

The affected residents are also aggrieved with Cooch Behar BJP MP Nisith Pramanik, who is junior home minister as well.

“He is staying away in Delhi when hundreds of people of his home district are spending nights under open sky. This is something we had never expected from him,” said Bijon Saha Barman, a schoolteacher in Cooch Behar town.

Natabari BJP MLA Mihir Goswami has even drawn flak from party leader Mintu Roy. “The MLA seems to have gone missing. People here cannot remember when they had last seen him. He seems to have forgotten them after winning the elections,” Roy wrote on social media.

Trinamul leader Rabindranath Ghosh said: “After the natural calamity, none of the BJP MLAs was found on the ground. This clearly indicates their lack of commitment to people.”