BJP forms panel to oversee induction in Bengal unit
‘Indiscriminate induction of leaders from different parties into BJP has brought a bad name to the party in the state.’
To arrest the growing disenchantment and increasing divide between the “old guard” and the “new guard” in the BJP’S Bengal unit, the central leadership of the party has devised a mechanism to oversee the induction of new members in the party fold in the state.
The central leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party has formed a screening committee headed by West Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh to formalise and streamline the joining of any political leader into the BJP from Bengal.
According to sources, the screening committee has been tasked with the responsibility to check the antecedents of the political leader willing to join the party, check the track record of the leader as a public representative, the hold the leader has among the people in his or her constituency and what benefits the leader could bring for the party.
This comes after the party faced a series of embarrassments when a large number of municipal leaders who joined the BJP leaving the Trinamool Congress (TMC) soon after the Lok Sabha results were announced, returned to the TMC fold within a few months of their joining the new party.
The BJP leadership in Bengal also said that this move was meant to check the growing factionalism within the party that has created a wide gap between the leaders who call themselves the “old guard” versus the ones who joined the party from TMC or other political parties. A senior party functionary from Bengal told The Sunday Guardian, “The indiscriminate joining of leaders from different political parties into the BJP has brought a bad name to the party. We have received feedback from our cadre from different districts that the BJP was slowly turning into a TMC and that people were unhappy with the way all these leaders, who until recently were involved with the ruling party (TMC) in extortion and violence, were being welcomed into the BJP.”
“This has also created a deep divide within the party ranks. Some of our senior leaders were particularly not happy with the way mass inductuion was going on, sometimes without even informing the state leadership. A sense of dissatisfaction and anger was also brewing at the local level leadership which was not ready to accept some of the leaders taken from TMC as they were the same people who had beaten up our men even during the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections,” the senior party functionary added.
The Central leadership of the BJP was apprised of the matter and after deliberations with the state leadership it was decided that any further induction of political leaders from Bengal into the BJP would have to be done by taking into confidence all the leaders from the state unit, the party functionary said.
The party has also decided to stop political leaders from Bengal flocking to the BJP headquarters in Delhi to join the party and have instructed its state unit to hold all induction programmes in Kolkata, unless the leader who is willing to join the party is of some eminence and has considerable clout in Bengal. It’s a bad time for the PCS in the Congress—both P. Chidambaram and Praveen Chakravarty from Team Rahul. In fact, while Chidambaram still gets some sympathy from his party colleagues, there is a lot of resentment for the other PC, whom Congress leaders feel misled their leader not only about the number of seats the party was expected to get, but more importantly, on the party’s trophy scheme, NYAY. This was conceived mainly by a think-tank led by both the PCS, and could have been a game changer, only it was lost in translation. Apparently, the details of the scheme were held as a closely guarded secret, compounded by the fact that the announcement was made in an off the cuff manner at a public rally by Rahul Gandhi, as a result of which party spokespersons had a tough time communicating it to the media and public at large. Well, talk about self goals.