Mission 2024: BJP’s triumvirate to lead campaign blitzkrieg in Bengal

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lead the BJP’s year-long campaign blitzkrieg in Bengal to regain the ground the party lost in the state due to unfulfilled promises among other factors. He is likely to address as many as 14 rallies in various Lok Sabha constituencies of the state this year, BJP sources said.

According to a tentative schedule the BJP central office has sent to its state unit, Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP national president JP Nadda will also hold 24 rallies in the state this year.

The trio was supposed to kick-start the campaign this month. But their visit has been put off. BJP state president Sukanta Majumder cited the party’s national executive on January 16-17 in New Delhi for the postponing of the tours.

Nadda was supposed to make a two-day visit to the state from January 7 while Shah was expected to address two rallies in the state on January 17. Modi was likely to address a meeting in north Bengal on January 19.

“Their visit has not been cancelled. It has been postponed because of some programmes of the central unit,” said state BJP spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya.

The BJP leaders said over the span of 2023, the trio will address meetings in all parliamentary constituencies across the state marked as “difficult” for the party.

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The campaign is part of the ‘Mission 2024’ that the BJP has launched nationwide, targeting 160 “difficult seats,” including 24 in West Bengal.

The party had earlier identified 144 seats for special attention, but last month it revised the target to 160. The revision was made because following the split with the Janata Dal (United), the BJP will have to now contest most of the seats in Bihar on its own, which it felt would make its winning prospect difficult.

The BJP central leadership has set a lofty target of improving its 2019 performance in Bengal, where it had won 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats.

Slumping vote share

Much water has flowed down the Ganges since then. After the shattering defeat in 2021 assembly elections, the faction-ridden Bengal BJP is a pale shadow of what it was four years ago.

The BJP’s Lok Sabha tally will reduce to around 11 if the assembly results are analysed parliamentary segment-wise. Its vote share shrunk from 40 per cent in 2019 to 38 per cent in 2021. The party’s vote share further dipped to 12 per cent in the elections to the 107 civic bodies held last year. More importantly, the Left Front surpassed the BJP to retain the second position in terms of vote share jointly polling 14 per cent votes.

In the Kolkata Municipal Corporation elections held in December 2021, the BJP managed to get only 9 per cent votes.

An internal report prepared by the party’s national general secretary Sunil Bansal, who was in August last year entrusted with the responsibility to rejuvenate the party in Bengal, highlighted the party’s current dismal strength at the grassroots.

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The assessment report, according to BJP sources, found out that the party has now very feeble presence in about half of the state’s 80,000 odd booths.

The report also pointed out that the party’s preparedness for the panchayat polls, likely to be held in March, is not satisfactory.

BJP insiders even claim that the meeting of the party’s top three leaders this month had to be put off because of the lack of preparedness.

Infighting, root of the problem

The party high command attributes much of its problem in Bengal to infighting among senior leaders and ‘ghar wapsi’ of Left cadres, who had backed the BJP to defeat their common enemy – the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress.

“Even Amit Shah ji expressed concern about the return of Left cadres to their mother parties during his meeting with us here (BJP state headquarters in Kolkata) last month,” said a senior state BJP leader.

He had also asked the party leaders to put up a united fight setting aside their differences, the BJP leader added.

The state BJP unit is divided into three camps—one led by state president Sukanta Majumder and two others by Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly Suvendu Adhikari and former state president Dilip Ghosh.

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The state leaderships in private, however, claimed that the party central leaders are largely responsible for the BJP’s present state of affairs in Bengal.

Unfulfilled promises

They pointed out that most of the promises made by the top leaders such as Modi and Shah ahead of 2019 general elections remained unfulfilled till date.

The BJP had promised citizenship to the state’s electorally influential Matua community under the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. The new law has not yet been implemented as the BJP-led central government is yet to frame rules for the CAA. The seventh extension for framing rules expired on December 31.

Matuas, who helped the BJP to win at least seven of the 18 seats it bagged in the last parliamentary elections, had been migrating to West Bengal from erstwhile East Pakistan and now Bangladesh since 1950s.

According to the 1955 citizenship act, all those who had come to India prior to the formation of Bangladesh in March 1971 are legal citizens of this country. Those who migrated after 1971 needed to apply for naturalization after a stay of eleven years to get citizenship.

The CAA 2019 lowered the cooling period to five.

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Disappointed over the BJP government’s failure to implement the Act, the Matuas are slowly distancing themselves from the party.

A senior leader of Matua Mahasangha and BJP MLA, Asim Sarkar recently warned that community members would no longer support the BJP if the CAA is not implemented before 2024 elections.

Another Scheduled Caste community of the state, Koch-Rajbongshis, too is waiting for the BJP to fulfill its poll promise of raising a paramilitary force battalion after the “Narayani Sena,” the royal army of the erstwhile princely state of Cooch Behar.

Similarly, the promise of granting Scheduled Tribe status to 11 Gorkha sub-castes too remains unfulfilled.

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There are many such unfulfilled promises, which the BJP now hopes to gloss over with its campaign offensive.