Is it over for Dilip Ghosh and BJP? His absence from key events sets off buzz

On May 29, PM Modi held a public meeting in Alipurduar, taking on the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and setting the tone for the 2026 polls in the state. Then, on June 1, Shah held a meeting of BJP party workers at the Netaji Indoor Stadium in Kolkata, where leaders from across the Bengal cadre were present.

Ghosh was not there at both the events, and while he said he was not invited for either, he played down the same. Asked by the media about his absence, he said Sunday: “Right now, I do not have any rank within the party. Naturally, I was not invited… It is not mandatory or essential to invite me to every meeting.”

Another former Bengal BJP president, Tathagata Roy, was also not there at Shah’s rally, Ghosh added.

Asked about Ghosh’s absence from the key party programmes, BJP state president Sukanta Majumdar said: “He (Ghosh) is a senior leader, but I cannot say much about why he was absent.”

For senior BJP leaders in Bengal, this development is an indication that the differences between the party and Ghosh have reached new heights.

“All state committee members of the West Bengal BJP unit were invited for Shah’s programme. We cannot say this officially, but the party wants to distance itself from Dilip Ghosh or he wants to distance from the party,” the leader said.

“We are assuming he will be less and less involved with the BJP in the coming Assembly polls,” a leader said.

Rise and fall

A long-time RSS worker, Ghosh was cherrypicked by the BJP leadership to head the Bengal unit in 2015.

The following year, in the 2016 Assembly elections, the BJP showed some early signs of growth, getting three seats amidst a TMC juggernaut and polling 17% of the vote share. Ghosh won his first Assembly seat in Medinipur.

For the next three years, Ghosh led a team that slowly laid the ground for the BJP in Bengal. Come the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the work paid off. The BJP won 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats, which was its best performance in the state until that point and Ghosh won the Medinipur Lok Sabha seat.

But fortunes turned around soon. The BJP failed to dislodge the Mamata Banerjee government in the 2021 Assembly polls, winning only 77 of the 294 seats.

In the aftermath of the loss, as a course-correcting measure, Ghosh was replaced by MP Sukanta Majumder. After that, Ghosh has been receding from the limelight.

Leaders such as Sayantan Basu and Ritesh Tiwary — who were close to Ghosh — started complaining that they were being sidelined. And in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Ghosh was not given a ticket from Medinipur. He was instead asked to contest from the Burdwan-Durgapur seat. This was a setback for Ghosh as he ended up losing to former cricketer and TMC candidate Kirti Azad.

The situation has become more tenous for Ghosh in recent months. In April, he was present at the Banerjee government’s showpiece event of the Jagannath Temple inauguration in Digha, and even had a brief interaction with the Chief Minister. Ghosh also praised the temple, which the TMC is pitching as a counter to the BJP’s Hindutva plank.

This did not go down well within BJP ranks. Majumder was the first to criticise Ghosh’s move, saying that the party had “collectively decided to boycott” the temple ceremony. Ghosh, in turn, said he did not need anyone’s permission to visit a temple.