Upset with campaign material not being put up on time, former BJP President of West Bengal, Rahul Sinha, in a scathing snub to his team asked them, “If he should ask Trinamool Congress (TMC) workers to do it instead”.
Sinha, who was the state unit president until the 2016 Assembly polls when Dilip Ghosh replaced him, held a meeting with his team for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections this week. A leader who was present there said, "He (Rahul Sinha) was very upset that even though he had been campaigning profusely for the past few weeks, there was no visible campaign material in the constituency."
"He was furious and said that if this keeps going on, he would be forced to ask TMC workers to come out and put up campaign material for him. Then, he said, the BJP wouldn't be able to say anything," added another leader present in the meeting.
Sinha is up against Trinamool veteran Sudip Bandyopadhyay, who won the north Kolkata seat in 2014 with a margin of nearly 90,000 votes. The seat has never seen saffron. In fact Sinha, contested the Jorasankho Assembly seat in 2016, after the flyover collapse in the area and lost to TMC's Smita Bakshi with a margin of over 6,000 votes.
Although the BJP officially denied to comment on the matter, Sinha's anger - sources said - was reflective of a larger issue of disarray within organisations of the party
"The state president (Dilip Ghosh) is contesting Lok Sabha polls, so he doesn't have time to coordinate. You've other senior leaders busy with campaign and then you have an organisation that has hardly been in this position before," said a state committee leader.
The ripples of disquiet generated from Sinha’s angry comments were felt across the party. Moreover, another former state president of the BJP and former Minister of State, Satyabrata Mookherjee reportedly said that party's national president Amit Shah's ambition to win 23 seats was "absurd and without any basis".
"Shah's tall claim that BJP will get 23 seats in Bengal is absurd and baseless," he said in an interview to a vernacular television channel on Monday. Mookherjee’s statement which comes just two weeks before Krishnanagar, the Lok Sabha seat from where he was elected in 1999, goes to poll, has put the BJP state unit in a tight spot, reported Millenium Post.
Mukherjee, the newspaper reported, had also expressed his displeasure over the virtual sidelining of senior party leaders like Lal Krishna Advani and Murali Manohar Joshi. He was the Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilizers between 2000 and 2002 and later Minister of State for Commerce and Industry between 2002 and 2003. He was also aminister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee's cabinet.
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