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Journalism of Courage
ONE OF the most surprising names in the BJP’s list for the West Bengal Assembly elections — incidentally the list released on March 14 that sparked protests across the state — has been Ashok Lahiri.
Lahiri thus becomes the first person to have served as the chief economic adviser to the Government of India to contest an election. He served in the post between October 2002 and June 2007, appointed under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and continuing under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
BJP leaders say that while Lahiri’s name has been dropped as a candidate from Alipurduar, for Suman Kanjilal, following protests, it was just a temporary hitch.
One of the reasons is that Lahiri has the full backing of the top BJP leadership. “They took the decision and they initiated the moves to rope him in. The idea was to lend a seriousness to the party’s campaign and its list,” said a senior party leader.
It was also seen as a bid to appeal to the urbane, middle-class Bengali voter intimidated by the BJP’s strident Hindutva appeal and concerned over its larger nationalist agenda subsuming the Bengali identity. Lahiri belongs to Kolkata. Amid confusion over BJP candidates, the Trinamool has been saying the BJP does not have enough candidates to field in Bengal’s 294 seats.
The BJP leadership was said to have been so keen on Lahiri, sources said, that it distributed his bio-data among leaders a while back. On the change of seat, the BJP leader said, “The issue is technical and it will take a few days to sort out. There is no political problem. He will be a BJP candidate.”
Soon after Lahiri’s name was announced for the Alipurduar seat in north Bengal, BJP Alipurduar district president Ganga Prasad Sharma had revolted saying the district leadership was not consulted. “We were completely in the dark about these candidates. We do not approve of them. The party should have taken our opinion before selecting them,” said Sharma. A day later, Sharma quit the BJP.
The Alipurduar Assembly seat used to be a stronghold of the RSP — a constituent of the CPM-led Left Front in West Bengal. In 2011, the Congress won the seat and in 2016, the Trinamool. However, the BJP had bagged 20,098 votes in the 2016 Assembly polls, or 10% of the total. The BJP’s new candidate for the seat, Kanjilal, is the general secretary of the party’s Alipurduar district committee.
As an economist, Lahiri has been an advocate of better partnership between the three levels of governments — Union, state and local — and efficacy at the grassroots. In an opinion piece in The Indian Express dated February 19 this year, he wrote: “Hopefully, over the next five years, through a partnership among the Union, states, and local governments, in the spirit of cooperative federalism, these recommendations and innovations will catalyse progress in the accountability and effectiveness of local governments in India.”
An alumnus of Presidency University, Kolkata, Lahiri has also been critical of the Communist governments in West Bengal and been sympathetic towards the Mamata Banerjee administration’s efforts to encourage business in the state, having inherited “a West Bengal in distress”. He is a proponent of encouraging entrepreneurship for reviving business sentiment in Bengal.
Lahiri has also, in the past, batted for “soft touch” government intervention in agricultural reforms.
Apart from the post of CEA, Lahiri has been an Economic Advisor in the Ministry of Finance, has had stints in the International Monetary Fund as Senior Economist and in the World Bank as Consultant, was director of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy between February 1998 and October 2002, a member of the Fifteenth Finance Commission, and a non-executive chairman of the Bandhan Bank. He retired as executive director from Asian Development Bank in June 2013.
BJP sources in Bengal say Lahiri is likely to be fielded now from Balurghat Assembly seat in South Dinajpur district.
Balurghat Assembly constituency has also traditionally been an RSP stronghold, with its leader Biswanath Chowdhury being an eight-time MLA from there. While in 2011, the Trinamool won the seat, Chowdhury regained the seat in 2016 by a thin margin.
However, in the 2016 polls, the BJP had got 15,282 votes, or 10.78% of the total.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won the Balurghat Lok Sabha seat by over 50% of the votes, getting nearly double the votes of its Trinamool rival.
