Once TMC’s Hindi-speaking strongman in Asansol, Jitendra Tiwari painted a target on his back since he jumped to BJP in 2021

For a long time, Tiwari (41) was one of a clutch of young, aggressive, Hindi-speaking tyros Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee had promoted after becoming the Chief Minister of West Bengal, to shepherd the state’s numerically significant Hindi-speaking population, especially in the areas bordering Jharkhand and Bihar, and the industrial belts around Hooghly.

While Tiwari’s family is originally from Siwan in Bihar, he was born in Asansol, West Barddhaman, and spent his childhood in the Damra area of the city.

He began his political career with rightist student politics and stood against the strong Left legacy of West Bengal. Just 30 when the TMC came to power, he became its face in Asansol within a very short period. He was elected the mayor of Asansol in 2015, and was elected to the Vidhan Sabha on a TMC ticket from Pandabeshwar in 2016.

His meteoric rise within the TMC made him an obvious target of other TMC leaders of West Burdwan. In December 2020, the Pandabeshwar MLA shot a letter to West Bengal Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim, accusing him of not granting funds for development work of Asansol under the Smart City Mission project. Before the 2021 Assembly elections, Tiwari resigned as chairman of the administrative board of the Asansol Municipal Corporation and then from the membership of the TMC, as he prepared to join the BJP at a time when the state’s electoral equations began to veer sharply towards polarisation along native vs outsider lines.

While many within the BJP, like Babul Supriyo and Locket Chatterjee, were opposed to his inclusion in the party, Tiwari was inducted in the presence of then BJP state president Dilip Ghosh on March 2, 2021. In the 2021 Assembly polls that followed, Tiwari failed to win Asansol for the BJP. The party also lost the Asansol municipality in 2022.

When the CBI interrogated TMC leader and state minister Malay Ghatak in the coal smuggling case, the West Bengal Police quickly named Tiwary in a tit-for-tat measure.

Then, on December 14, three people, including a child, were killed and at least four injured in a stampede at a blanket donation programme organised by the BJP. Party legislator and Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly Subhendu Adhikari was present at the programme, but Tiwari was named in the FIR. Since then, it was a matter of time before the state police would move in.