Bengal Bypoll Setback For BJP Spells Urgent Need For Complete Overhaul Of State Unit

The BJP suffered another setback in Bengal: it lost all four Assembly seats for which bypolls were held last week. 

The BJP had won three of these four seats in 2021, but the defection of the victorious BJP candidates from the three constituencies to the Trinamool Congress necessitated the byelections in those seats. The byelection in the fourth seat was due to the death of the incumbent Trinamool Congress MLA. 

Even in the just-concluded Lok Sabha elections, the BJP got very comfortable leads from all the three Assembly segments, and also fared quite well in the fourth. 

That’s why the BJP’s stunning defeats in all these four seats is not only humiliating for the party, but also signals that the party has gone into a decline in Bengal. 

The performance of the BJP candidates in the bypolls should also serve as an urgent wake-up call for the central leadership which can only put off the urgently required drastic overhaul of the Bengal unit at the party’s own peril. 

If nothing is done and drift allowed to continue, the BJP central leadership may well resign itself to the saffron party becoming a marginal and even inconsequential political force in Bengal very soon. 

The BJP’s excuse that the polls were rigged do not hold much water and the party has only itself to blame for its dreadful performance. 

The bypoll results:

By-elections were held in the Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagdah, Raiganj and Maniktala Assembly seats last week and the results were declared Saturday (July 13). 

The BJP had won the first three (Ranaghat Dakshin, Bagdah and Raiganj) in 2021 with comfortable margins. The Trinamool Congress had won Maniktala. 

But even after all the BJP MLAs of the three seats defected to the Trinamool in and after 2021, the BJP secured leads in all the three Assembly segments in the recent Lok Sabha elections. 

Ranaghat Dakshin : This Assembly constituency is part of the Ranaghat Lok Sabha seat which the BJP’s Jagannath Sarkar won this time (2024 Lok Sabha elections) by a margin of nearly 1.87 lakh votes. Sarkar trounced Trinamool’s Mukut Mani Adhikari. 

Adhikari had won the Ranaghat Dakshin Assembly seat, a stronghold of the Matuas, in 2021 on a BJP ticket. He is considered to be a poster boy of the Matua Mahasangh. But Adhikari defected to the Trinamool Congress in March this year and was fielded by Mamata Banerjee for the Lok Sabha elections from Ranaghat. 

Sarkar had got a lead of over 37,000 votes from the Ranaghat Dakshin Assembly segment in the Lok Sabha elections. 

Despite the drubbing he received in the Lok Sabha elections, Adhikari was fielded by the Trinamool once again in the Assembly by-elections from Ranaghat Dakshin. The BJP fielded Manoj Biswas, a Matua, in the by-elections.

But that was a poor choice. Biswas is a resident of Krishnanagar and his nomination set off waves of protests by BJP workers and local functionaries who demanded that a local (resident of Ranaghat) be given the party ticket. 

The party leadership ignored the protests and Adhikari, who had trailed by a huge margin from this Assembly segment very recently, defeated Biswas by over 39,000 votes.

Bagdah Assembly seat: This Assembly constituency is part of the Bongaon Lok Sabha seat which was won by BJP’s Santanu Thakur this time by over 73,000 votes. Thakur, a junior Union Minister, had won Bongaon LS Seat (another Matua stronghold) in 2019 as well. 

The Bagdah Assembly seat was won by the BJP’s Biswajit Das in 2021. Das was with the Trinamool Congress earlier and had won the Bongaon Uttar Assembly seat (which is also part of the Bongaon Lok Sabha seat) in 2011 and 2016 for the Trinamool Congress. He defected to the BJP in 2019 and was fielded from Bagdah Assembly seat two years later. 

But soon after winning Bagdah in 2021 as a BJP candidate, he returned to the Trinamool. 

The Trinamool fielded Santanu Thakur’s cousin Madhupurna Thakur in the by-elections while the BJP fielded Binay Biswas, a leader of the Matua Mahasangh. 

But as in Ranaghat Dakshin, the BJP’s nominee faced protests from party workers in Bagdah as well since he was not a ‘local’. 

An RSS functionary of Bagdah, Satyajit Majumdar, was fielded by angry local BJP functionaries as an Independent candidate. Though he did not get any significant number of votes, he queered the pitch for the BJP candidate.

The 25-year-old Madhupurna Thakur also garnered a lot of public sympathy due to the protests she staged along with her mother--Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP Mamata Bala Thakur--after they were evicted from ‘Thakurbari’ (the large mansion where the extended family of the Thakurs stay) by Santanu Thakur. 

Santanu’s father Manjul Krishna Thakur is the elder brother of late Kapil Krishna Thakur who won the Bongaon Lok Sabha seat in 2014 on a Trinamool Congress ticket. He died in October 2014 and the Trinamool fielded his widow Mamata Bala Thakur in the bypolls the next year. 

She won the bypolls, and was fielded once again by the Trinamool in 2019. But she lost to her nephew Santanu Thakur that year. 

The BJP’s defeat in Bagdah, as well as Ranaghat Dakshin, also indicate that the saffron party is fast losing the support of the Matuas. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which the BJP thought would seal the support of the Matuas for the party for years to come, has not worked primarily because the Trinamool Congress has succeeded in sowing doubts among the Matuas over its provisions. The BJP failed to counter the Trinamool’s propaganda.

Raiganj Assembly seat: This is a part of the Raiganj Lok Sabha seat that the BJP won in 2019 and this time (2024) as well. 

In the 2021 Assembly elections, BJP’s Krishna Kalyani defeated the Trinamool candidate by a margin of over 20,000 votes from Raiganj. Kalyani, an industrialist, switched to the Trinamool Congress in October 2021. 

But just a little over two months later (elections to the Raiganj Lok Sabha seat was held in the second phase on April 26), the voters of Raiganj Assembly constituency handed the BJP a resounding defeat by voting overwhelmingly for Kalyani. Kalyani won by a margin of over 50,000 votes this time. 

The BJP had fielded Manas Kumar Ghosh, who had defected from the Trinamool Congress to the BJP last year, as its candidate for the byelections. Ghosh was handpicked by Suvendu Adhikari and his defeat is considered to be a huge embarrassment for Adhikari.

In Raiganj also, local BJP workers and functionaries were unhappy with the party’s choice of candidate and did not work for Ghosh. 

Maniktala Assembly constituency: This has been a Trinamool Congress stronghold since 2011 when the party’s Sadhan Pande wrested the seat from the Left. Pande won this seat in 2016 and 2021 as well, but passed away in February 2022. 

The Trinamool fielded Sandhan Pande’s widow, Supti Pande, in the byelections and she won by a huge margin of over 62,000 votes. Supti Pande, a personal friend of Mamata Banerjee, polled four times the total number of votes bagged by the BJP’s Kalyan Chaubey. 

Chaubey, a former footballer and current president of the All India Football Federation, joined the BJP in 2015 and was fielded by the party in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from the Krishnanagar Lok Sabha seat. He lost to the Trinamool’s Mahua Moitra. 

In 2021, he was fielded by the BJP from Maniktala Assembly constituency. He lost to Sadhan Pande by a margin of over 20,000 votes, but got a respectable vote share of 35.6 per cent. His vote share fell sharply to 17.93 per cent in the bypolls this time, reflecting the fast erosion of support for the BJP in this urban constituency. 

Maniktala is part of the Kolkata Uttar Lok Sabha seat which is a Trinamool Congress stronghold. But the Trinamool trailed behind the BJP in a good number of wards in the Maniktala Assembly segment in the Lok Sabha elections held just over a month ago. Polling in Kolkata Uttar Lok Sabha seat was held in the last phase on June 1. 

Just six weeks after a good number of Maniktala’s electorate voted for the BJP’s Tapas Roy (who had defected from the Trinamool Congress), they turned their backs on the saffron party and voted overwhelmingly for the Trinamool’s Supti Pande. 

In the Lok Sabha elections six weeks ago, the Trinamool had got a slender lead of just 3,500 votes from Maniktala. The Trinamool was quite perturbed and Mamata Banerjee personally intervened to get all warring factions within her party to work together to ensure Supti Pande’s victory. 

The BJP, on the other hand, ran a listless campaign and suffered from a host of organisational deficiencies. The saffron party had few workers on the ground to campaign for its candidate. 

What went wrong for the BJP

The ignominy heaped on the BJP by the voters of the four Assembly seats is hardly surprising. Things have been going downhill for the BJP since 2020 when, in its zeal to capture power in Bengal, it started engineering a string of defections from the Trinamool Congress. 

While it may have added to its ranks by doing so, the BJP lost the ‘party with a difference’ tag.

The huge number of scam-tainted and corruption-accused Trinamool Congress functionaries across all levels who flocked to the BJP--and the BJP brass welcomed them without any inhibitions--tainted the image of the BJP permanently. 

Among the turncoats were also many ‘Trojan horses’ who the Trinamool leadership planted within the BJP to work as saboteurs within the saffron party. 

That the BJP central leadership has failed to weed out these ‘undesirables’ has raised serious doubts about the intent, or the lack of it, on the part of the BJP central leadership to set things right in Bengal. 

As is also well known, the disappointing performance of the party in the 2021 Assembly elections was compounded by fierce attacks on party workers and supporters by Trinamool  Congress goons. 

The BJP state and central leadership failed to stand by the party cadres and supporters. 

As a result, the BJP saw a huge erosion of workers. Left to fend for themselves, a large number of party workers and lower-level functionaries, fearing for their lives and disappointed by the absence of any support from the party leadership, chose to disassociate themselves from the party or even join the Trinamool Congress to save themselves and their families and properties. 

The BJP leadership failed to even boost the morale of the dejected cadres and supporters. Matter were allowed to drift and very soon, factionalism, ego battles between state leaders and bickering broke out and convulsed the state unit. 

The party’s central leadership still chose to turn a blind eye to the unsavoury goings-on in the party’s state unit. Only ineffectual cosmetic changes were made. No attempt was made to re-energise the party, overhaul the state unit, reassure the cadres and bring them back into the party and, most importantly, snuff out dissidence and factionalism. 

No attempt was, very surprisingly, made to identify and expel the saboteurs within the party. The BJP central leadership did not crack the whip on party functionaries who were in touch with the Trinamool Congress and were even receiving favours from the ruling party in Bengal. 

Also, the BJP central leadership failed to project a ‘son of the soil’ (a Bengali)--an untainted, committed and charismatic leader--who would be a strong counter to Mamata Banerjee. The state party unit still lives under the shadow of the central leadership, something that does not go down well with Bengal’s electorate. 

The poor show in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls--the BJP’s tally fell from 18 (of 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal) in 2019 to 12 this time--was, once again, hardly surprising.

Warning for party leadership

The BJP’s rout in last week’s byelections should serve as the last wake-up call for the party’s central leadership. Drastic action is required for a complete overhaul of the party unit in the state. 

If the party’s central leadership fails to take remedial action even now, it may as well expect a complete rout in the 2026 Assembly elections. The BJP is fast becoming a spent force in Bengal, and the sooner the party’s central leadership realises this, the better it is for the party.