BJP president Amit Shah appears to have finally stepped in to curb the squabbling in the West Bengal unit of the BJP. Shah has decided to personally look after the BJP's organisation in West Bengal in the run-up to the coming Lok Sabha elections.
Peeved with the internal squabbling in the West Bengal BJP, Shah has decided to send central BJP workers—hailing from different parts of India—to each of the 42 Lok Sabha seats of West Bengal.
West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha and the northeastern states have around 130 Lok Sabha seats and the BJP is
looking to gain a majority of these seats to offset possible losses in north India, which gave the BJP 160 seats out of 190 in 2014. While prospects in the northeast, Bihar and Odisha appear bright for the BJP, the saffron party is lagging behind in West Bengal because of organisational woes. A major problem is
infighting among the top leaders.
According to a state BJP leader, Shah plans to create a 'war room' in each Lok Sabha constituency, consisting of 30 members (all outsiders), who will train local leaders from the village level upward.
Consequently, 42 such 'war rooms' would be formed across the state and state party chief Dilip Ghosh has been asked to take such war rooms on rent till the Lok Sabha election.
Shah's control of the BJP in West Bengal would be so strong that each Lok Sabha constituency in West Bengal would have a social media portal and their passwords would all be with the Delhi office, not with the state office.
"All the committees would not be reporting to any state leader but would report directly to our national party president Amit Shah," said the state leader.
The state BJP leaders would have no control over such centrally controlled war rooms and instead such committees would send reports to Shah about the movement and activities of the state and central leaders.
"The national president would thus now be getting reports from different leaders of the state or state prabharis. He would be able to know what is happening in Bengal from the rural level as committees would be connected through videoconferencing every day," the state leader said.
Shah, along with national secretary in-charge of the Delhi office Arvind Menon, would monitor reports.
The decision by Shah to get personally involved came after a barrage of criticism from many central leaders and even state leaders that too many cooks were spoiling the broths for the BJP in West Bengal.
During a recent interview, BJP's state vice president, Chandra Bose, for the first time lashed out at Bengal BJP, alleging, “It has four pillars of leaderships and workers don't know whom to move to during any crisis.”
Shah had sat together with Ghosh during the BJP's national executive meeting and told him about his "grand plan" for West Bengal.
Shah was informed about the problems by state prabhari for West Bengal Kailash Vijayvargiya recently. Vijayvargiya recently told Shah, during the national executive, that unless something drastic was done, it would be difficult to achieve Shah's dream target of winning at least 25 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal.
Interestingly, Ghosh felt there was nothing wrong in Shah 'centralising' the leadership in West Bengal.
"In fact, central leadership would take more and more actions and we would win maximum seats from Bengal," said Ghosh.
BJP activist held for accepting bribe
The Kolkata Police on Saturday arrested a BJP activist, Ranjit Majumder, for allegedly accepting bribes in the distribution of gas cylinders and petrol pumps in Murshidabad and some other districts of West Bengal. A former BJP leader, Ashok Sarkar, had lodged a complaint against Majumder and Majumder was picked up from his home at Jonrasako police station limits in Kolkata.
While some BJP state leaders claimed that Majumder was not a major functionary in the state, Ghosh admitted, "He is our party worker and was falsely implicated. Our workers across Bengal are falsely implicated in all cases and Ranjit is one of them. We will fight the case legally."
