As senior BJP leader and Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday wrapped up his three-day visit to West Bengal, he tried to unite the party and invited former state BJP chief Dilip Ghosh to a core group meeting to review the party’s preparations for the Assembly polls in the state, due in three months.
Sources in the BJP said that the quartet of state BJP chief Samik Bhattacharya, two former state presidents Dilip Ghosh and Sukanta Majumdar, and Leader of Opposition in Assembly Suvendu Adhikari will form the core team to lead the party in the election.
Ghosh, who had been sidelined by the party and was keeping a low profile for some time amid the infighting in the BJP’s West Bengal unit, was invited by Shah to a meeting of senior leaders.
The meeting was attended by Samik Bhattacharya, Suvendu Adhikari, Sukanta Majumdar, and party’s central observers Sunil Bansal, Bhupendra Yadav, Biplab Deb, and BL Santosh.
After coming out of the meeting, Ghosh told the waiting mediapersons, “I was invited to share my experiences, and I had come to listen to the HM (Home Minister Shah). I cannot say much right now, but you will see an active Dilip Ghosh in the 2026 elections.”
According to sources, Shah’s strict instruction to party leaders was to keep all their differences aside and work together as a team of four top leaders, who would “lead the BJP towards their target of winning the Assembly polls”.
According to senior leaders, the meeting was also a sign of bridging the gap between the old and the new generation.
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Ghosh was once the face of the BJP in West Bengal, but his role in the party started to shrink after he was dropped as state party chief in 2021 following the party’s failed attempt to unseat TMC from power.
For the past several months, he has largely stayed away from the party activities in the state. In April this year, he hit the headlines when he met TMC supremo and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at Digha during the inauguration of the Jagannath Temple and praised the construction of the temple. As his photos with the CM were flashed across news channels and newspapers, it did not go down well within the BJP ranks. The then state BJP chief Sukanta Majumder was the first to criticise his predecessor’s move, saying that the party had “collectively decided to boycott” the temple ceremony. Ghosh, in turn, had said that he did not need anyone’s permission to visit a temple.
In the subsequent months, he was reportedly not invited to two key party events in West Bengal – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public meeting in Alipurduar on May 29, and the June 1 meeting of BJP workers with Amit Shah in Kolkata, where leaders from across the state were present.
The firebrand leader, known for making controversial remarks, Ghosh is also considered to be the most successful state BJP president. A long-time RSS worker, Ghosh was cherry-picked by the BJP leadership to head the Bengal unit in 2015. Under his leadership, the BJP rose from three seats in the Assembly to over 70, and won 18 parliamentary seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections.
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Sources in the party said that Ghosh has a huge ground-level support and is very popular among the party’s grassroots workers.
“Dilip Ghosh is required for the upcoming Assembly polls, which is why a separate meeting was held. His aggressive campaign style can be useful during the coming elections,” a senior party leader said.
On Tuesday, Shah set the tone for the high-stakes Assembly polls and launched a broadside against Mamata Banerjee, accusing her government of “dangerously altering” the state’s demography by “abetting infiltration” of Bangladeshis for electoral gains and indulging in widespread corruption.
Before returning to Delhi, Shah addressed a closed-door meeting of grassroots workers where he identified the issues of “infiltration and corruption” as the primary issues to attack the ruling TMC, which has been in power in the state for 15 years.
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Shah said both infiltration and corruption have acquired “institutional status” under the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress regime and that the metropolis “wouldn’t remain immune for long from the impact of these vices”.
