BJP IN BENGAL: A FACE TOO MANY
The BJP in Bengal, which was till recently scrabbling around for a chief ministerial candidate who could take on the charismatic incumbent Mamata Banerjee, is now looking at a problem of plenty. New names of aspirants for the top job, should the BJP win in next year’s assembly election, are popping up every week, creating confusion in the party’s rank and file.
With the election just eight months away, the hesitation in projecting a face is understandable— ambition runs high in the state unit and factional rivalries could affect the party’s prospects. The flip side of dithering over that choice is that it might firm up popular perception that the BJP is yet to strike a chord in Bengal. Chances are indeed high that the BJP will ultimately fall back, as usual, on that solitary failsafe option of projecting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and hope that he will carry the day. Even at risk of lending credence to the ruling Trinamool Congress’s narrative that the “Hindi heartland party” has little knowledge or understanding of Bengali culture, its ethos and its icons. The delay in projecting a bankable Bengali face is certainly raising doubts, especially among the intelligentsia, over how keen the BJP really is about its Bengal project.
For the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the party had banked heavily on national leaders to lead the campaign with the prime minister criss-crossing the state 15 times. But that election was for the government at the Centre, and Modi also had the so-called TINA (‘there is no alternative’) factor going for him. State elections are a different ball game, and the forthcoming one in Bengal, due in April-May 2021, might really boil down to a popular verdict on whether Mamata should get a third consecutive term. She will be judged on her governance record, her welfare schemes, the development programmes and the management of recent crises such as the Covid pandemic and Cyclone Amphan. The BJP’s task is cut out: it needs to name a leader who can counter Mamata’s appeal among the poor, especially in Bengal’s rural and semi-urban areas.
State BJP president Dilip Ghosh, a former RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) pracharak, known for his street-fighter image and aggressive nationalist cred, has made inroads in rural pockets, where people have begun to see him as a tough challenger, capable of shielding them from the muscular excesses of the Trinamool cadre. His own belligerence has been a source of reassurance for party workers and supporters. Ghosh once told india today: “Almost every week, I have to lay a wreath on the body of one of our workers because I am the state president. Other leaders don’t have to do this. Ninety-four of our men have been killed. Even after all this, if somebody thinks I will talk sweetly, then I beg to differ.”
THE DELAY IN PROJECTING A BANKABLE BENGALI NAME IS RAISING DOUBTS ABOUT HOW KEEN THE BJP REALLY IS ABOUT ITS BENGAL PROJECT
Ghosh certainly has a following in rural Bengal, but his outlandish theories about cow milk having trace elements of gold and cow urine being a possible cure for Covid-19 will be unpalatable to the educated, middleclass Bengali bhadralok. He does not lack detractors in his own party. His comments frequently invite sniggers from people like Union minister Babul Supriyo and intellectuals like Rajya Sabha MP and commentator Swapan Dasgupta and former Meghalaya governor Tathagata Roy. Ghosh shrugs it off and occasionally returns the compliment in characteristic fashion: “Supriyo is an artist, he can’t talk tough; I can and I’m proud of it.”
One more hat in the ring is Roy’s, whose Twitter self-portrait is of a “right-wing Hindu socio-political activist, thinker, writer, ideologue”. Meghalaya governor till last week, Roy is back in Kolkata and has tweeted that he’ll meet Ghosh to join the party officially next week. He says he’s ready to take on the top job, if the party is willing. Roy founded the construction engineering department at Jadavpur University and is well educated, but he has a penchant for controversial remarks. Sample these: “Bengalis were either mopping floors or working as bar dancers in Mumbai” (this, to explain the job crunch in Bengal) or “the Hindu-Muslim problem won’t be solved without a civil war”. If the party’s strategy is to polarise voters on communal lines, this approach might be expedient, but it is likely to alienate the educated city voter who wants to preserve Bengal’s secular fabric.
For that voter, if he is looking for change, the articulate and erudite Swapan Dasgupta might be the man. Dasgupta’s inexperience in the rough and tumble of politics could be a hurdle but RSS leader Jishnu Bose reminds you of past chief ministers, like the CPI(M)’s Jyoti Basu and Congress’s Siddhartha Shankar Ray, who were held in high esteem for their knowledge and political acumen acquired on the job. Dasgupta, himself, brushed aside the possibility as media-fuelled speculation. “The first thing is to win the election, the question of chief minister will come later. This is going to be a bloody tough, violent and dirty election and the entire focus of the party ought to be on winning it,” he says.
Sourav ‘Dada’ Ganguly is the other name doing the rounds. He has a herolike stature in the state, demonstrated leadership chops, and a certain classdefying appeal that might drive consensus on his candidature. He can queer the pitch for Mamata. Speculation has been rife ever since Dada beat Brijesh Patel to become surprise BCCI president, after Union home minister Amit Shah’s late-night match-fixing moves with Union MoS Anurag Thakur.
Although Ganguly has been silent on the issue, his proud wife Dona Ganguly said if he did take the plunge, he’d be “a top player, just like his glorious innings as captain of the Indian cricket team”. On Sourav’s birthday on July 8, BJP senior leader and West Bengal minder Arvind Menon tweeted with a poster of Ganguly: “Before his captaincy, cricket was just a game. When @SGanguly99 became captain, the Indian team learned to fight.” Read that as you will.