(This story was first published on 14 May and has been updated and re-published in light of recent political developments in West Bengal.)
After suffering a loss in the West Bengal Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Bengal unit is handling more than just the electoral failure. The BJP’s campaign for the elections saw the party putting all its resources – capital and human – into the fight. The Prime Minister, the Home Minister, multiple Union Ministers, and party leaders from across the country, were roped in for the campaign, even as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the country.
A big part of this campaign was also the BJP’s consistent (and successful) efforts of poaching MLAs, MPs and other big leaders from its opponent, the Trinamool Congress. Of these turncoats, 19 of whom were given BJP tickets, 13 lost their seats. Some of them were sitting MLAs from their constituencies. All of them joined with the conviction that the BJP will form the next government.
In the run up to the elections, handled by the party’s central leadership in Delhi, a lot of adjustments, additions and changes were hastily made to the state organisation of the party, a lot of which would have fallen in place had the BJP won the election. Now that it hasn’t, a looming organisational crisis looks BJP in the face.
Former TMC leaders like Dipendu Biswas and Sonali Guha have already publicly said that they want to go back to the party because "they didn't get a place in the BJP". However, the most amount of speculation right now is about that of former TMC no. 2 and now BJP's national vice-president Mukul Roy. Roy's wife, who has been hospitalised, was visited by Mamata Banerjee's nephew Abhishek Banerjee. Almost right after that Roy received a phone call from Prime Minister Modi himself. This while his son Subhrangshu Roy, a candidate in the election who lost his seat, has been posting cryptic messages against the saffron brigade on Facebook. The public dissent and now evident cracks in the party, is something the BJP will have to solve with immediate effect.