Battleground Bengal: Avoidable Bungles In Nominations Sets BJP Back In Many Seats

Angry demonstrations, ransacking of party offices and even acute embarrassments over faux pas have marked the BJP’s ticket distribution in many of the 294 Assembly seats in West Bengal where elections are due from next week.

All these have revealed a failure of the state leadership and the central observers deputed to Bengal to gauge the mood among party workers, take them into confidence and the lack of adequate homework on their part.

The biggest embarrassment--and this is perhaps unprecedented in the history of elections in India--came two days ago when two candidates named by the BJP for two seats in Kolkata denied that they were even members of the party!

The two--Shikha Mitra, widow of former state Congress chief Somen Mitra, and Tarun Saha, husband of an outgoing Trinamool legislator--said they were stunned to learn that they had been nominated as BJP candidates (read this).

Shikha Mitra had contested and won the Chowringhee Assembly seat in Kolkata on a Trinamool ticket in 2011. But she resigned from the party in 2014 and returned to the Congress.

The BJP had nominated her from the same seat, but she told the media that she had turned down the BJP’s invitation to join the party. “They must have lost their minds,” she told the media, referring to the BJP leadership.

Tarun Saha is the husband of Mala Saha, the outgoing Trinamool legislator from Kashipur-Belgachia seat. She won from this seat in 2011 and 2016, but this time the Trinamool has nominated another person from this seat.

Saha also said he never joined the BJP and is firmly with the Trinamool.

BJP sources said that some individual leaders had reached out to both Mitra and Saha. Mitra was said to be unhappy with the Congress for not nominating her from Chowringhee while Saha was also angry with the Trinamool for not re-nominating his wife from her seat.

“They (Mitra and Saha) were hesitant to join the BJP, but were requested to reconsider their stand. They reportedly assured our intermediaries that they would. But it was a mistake to not take their approval before announcing their names as our candidates,” a senior state BJP leader told Swarajya.

This embarrassing development has definitely dented the BJP’s image and provided buoyancy to the Trinamool’s charge that the BJP does not have enough candidates for all the seats.

The BJP on Friday withdrew the nomination of Ashok Lahiri, the former chief economic advisor to the Government of India, from Alipurduar in North Bengal and announced the name of a local party leader, Suman Kanjilal, as its candidate for the seat.

Though the BJP cited technical reasons--that Lahiri was yet to get his name transferred to the Alipurduar voters’ list--for withdrawing his nomination, the fact is that the announcement of Lahiri’s had been met by widespread protests.

BJP workers and local leaders, led by the district president Ganga Prasad Sharma, staged angry demonstrations, thus embarrassing the state and central leadership.

There have been demonstrations by angry BJP workers protesting the nomination of ‘outsiders’ (BJP members, but from outside the state or not belonging to those constituencies) and ignoring the claims of local leaders in many other parts of the state.

Earlier this week, a series of demonstrations were staged in front of the state party headquarters and one of the demonstrations turned violent earlier this week, prompting cops to resort to a lathi-charge.

BJP workers and leaders are angry in as many as 40 constituencies (according to reports culled from newspapers and local TV channels) for nominations being given to ‘outsiders’ as well as recent entrants into the saffron party from the Trinamool.

So grave was the outbreak of resentment over nominations that Union Home Minister Amit Shah held an emergency meeting with state BJP leaders and the party’s Bengal minders in Kolkata.

Shah reportedly gave the state leaders a piece of his mind and asked them to meet local functionaries of all constituencies where resentment over nominations exists in order to placate them and convince them to work for the party’s victory.

The meeting that started late Monday evening and was attended by BJP national president J.P. Nadda, went on till 3.30 am. Shah then flew back to Delhi and summoned state leaders to discuss and finalise the nominations for the least few phases of elections in New Delhi.

But despite Shah’s intervention and his directive to state leaders, the problems persist. This is evident from more protests that met the announcement of the list of candidates for the last four phases of polls.

It is apparent that state BJP leaders and the BJP’s minders for Bengal--Kailash Vijayvargiya, Shivprakash and Arvind Menon--have failed to do their homework meticulously.

The resentment over nomination of recent entrants from the Trinamool, as well as some ‘outsiders’, is turning out to be difficult for the party leadership to handle.

“Till just the other day, these new entrants from the Trinamool were our sworn enemies and we suffered a lot because of them. Many of them were responsible for attacks on us and many of our functionaries even lost their lives to such attacks. It is grossly unfair on the part of the party leadership to overlook our sacrifices and hard work and give tickets to Trinamool turncoats,” explained a senior BJP functionary from Hooghly.

The BJP unit in Hooghly is on the boil over nomination given to a former Trinamool minister, Rabindranath Bhattacharya (88) from Singur.

“He (Bhattacharya) harmed us a lot and caused us immense sufferings. We used to abuse him and campaign against him. How is it possible now to campaign in his favour?” asked the BJP leader from Hooghly.

Some of the Trinamool turncoats who have been given BJP tickets are perceived to be corrupt. A senior state BJP leader who is against nomination of Trinamool turncoats told Swarajya that the anger of the cadres is justified.

“Till the other day, they were labelling these very same Trinamool leaders ‘corrupt’. With what face will they ask people to vote for the same persons they had labelled as corrupt?” he wondered.

The nomination of ‘outsiders’ who don’t have any links or bonds with the constituencies they have been nominated from is also causing acute resentment.

The senior state BJP leader took the example of one such ‘outsider’ who has been given the BJP ticket from a constituency in central Bengal.

“There are many eligible candidates in that constituency who are popular amongst workers and the local people and have a lot of credibility. They have toiled for the party and sacrificed a lot. Some had even been jailed on false charges by the police only for being associated with the BJP. It is wrong to ignore them and foist an outsider on them,” he explained.

BJP workers and functionaries in as many as ten districts of the state are up in arms and want the state and central leadership to change candidates in many seats.

They have threatened to work against these ‘unwanted’ candidates, or abstain from campaigning at best, if corrective action is not taken.

The state leadership, however, is reaching out to them in a desperate effort to placate them and get them to bury their anger and work for the party.

While such efforts may ultimately meet with a fair degree of success given the fact that BJP cadres are mostly a disciplined lot, it cannot be denied that a lot of precious time and effort that could have been devoted to campaigning is being lost in sorting out differences and placating angry cadres and functionaries.

That represents a substantial setback for the BJP. And the party has none to blame except its state leaders and the minders deputed by the central leadership for this.