As counting trends give the BJP a comfortable lead over the incumbent Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the focus is on how the Bengal BJP managed to script a stellar turnaround in the eastern state.  The BJP won 77 seats in the 2021 Assembly polls, emerging as the second-largest party in Bengal. But in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, its score dropped to 12 from 18 in the 2019 general election. This time, however, it appears set to make a massive comeback. 

In July last year, the BJP’s central leadership appointed Shamik Bhattacharya as the BJP’s state president in West Bengal. This was a significant move because Bhattacharya was a BJP old-timer from the days of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, when the BJP was a peripheral force in Bengal’s political landscape.

Bhattacharya’s appointment has reaped dividends. While Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, was the face of the BJP in rural Bengal, the soft-spoken, photography enthusiast Bhattacharya tried to establish a connection with the ‘bhadralok’ voter in Kolkata and suburban Bengal. 

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Trinamool and Mamata Banerjee’s big weapon against the BJP was its ‘outsider’ narrative. In election after election, Trinamool painted the BJP as a north Indian party that did not understand Bengal’s cultural milieu. Claims were made that the BJP would target Bengalis’ food habits if it came to power. 

In the run-up to this election, a main focus of the BJP was to counter this narrative. BJP leaders made a public show of eating fish – Bengal’s staple – to drive home the point that it has no plan to crack down on Bengalis’ plates. Shamik Bhattacharya, the state party chief, stressed that Bengal will have its fish and meat.  

A crucial move the BJP made in Bengal was to bring veteran state leaders, seen as sidelined for years, back into the spotlight. A key example is Dilip Ghosh, the former state BJP chief. Ghosh was seen as being sidelined in the past few years. But this time, the party leadership brought him back into the spotlight, fielding him from stronghold Kharagpur Sadar. 

Another big example was the elevation of Rahul Sinha as a Rajya Sabha MP. Once a key face of the state BJP unit, Sinha had been out of the limelight for a while.  The goal was to send a message to the old timers in the party that the BJP wants them to join the big fight. 

The BJP’s tactic was on display when veteran Bengal leaders, from Dilip Ghosh to former Governor Tathagata Roy, stood on the dais as Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated each of them in one of the BJP rallies during the poll countdown. 

In the 2021 election, the BJP lacked organisational strength at the grassroots as compared to the Trinamool Congress. This time, the BJP worked extensively to fix this. Union minister Bhupender Yadav, who took over the party’s in-charge for the Bengal battle, focused on fortifying the network of BJP booth workers. The party even conducted oral and written tests to choose its polling agents. For the past six months, the party’s focus has been to build a ground network with two main objectives – countering the fear factor in rural belts and ensuring voters come to the booths.