Dilip Ghosh.
Credit: PTI Photo
Kolkata: The rift within the Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal once again came out in the open as the former chief of its state unit, Dilip Ghosh, has not ruled out the possibility of his party colleagues being involved in a ‘conspiracy’ to malign him with a vulgar video circulated online.
“That is something police should investigate and find out,” Ghosh said, when a journalist asked him if any BJP insider had a role in circulating the video online and linking it with him. “It is not possible for me to say, merely based on suspicion, who is involved and who is not. I have sought help from the police.”
The video has a man and a woman, and the 60-year-old BJP leader alleged that the male character had been “linked” to him while circulating it online. He already registered a complaint about the video with the cybercrime police station at the headquarters of the Kolkata Police, alleging that attempts were being made to malign him.
Ghosh, a former ‘pracharak’ of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had led the BJP as its West Bengal unit chief during the 2021 state assembly polls, which had established the saffron party as the principal challenger to the ruling Trinamool Congress.
The BJP’s tally had gone up from just three seats in the 294-member assembly in 2016 to 77 in 2021.
But, in the past four years, Suvendu Adhikari, who quit the TMC to join the BJP ahead of the 2021 polls, emerged as the saffron party’s most prominent face in West Bengal.
The relations between Ghosh and Adhikari turned sour after the veteran leader was asked to contest from the state’s Bardhaman-Durgapur Lok Sabha constituency in the 2024 parliamentary elections, instead of Medinipur, where he had won in 2019. Adhikari, according to the party insiders, played a key role in changing the constituency of Ghosh, who ultimately lost to the TMC’s Kirti Azad.
Ghosh defied the party’s call for boycotting the inauguration of Lord Jagannath’s temple in Digha by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. He not only attended the event on April 30 but also had a courtesy meeting with the ruling Trinamool Congress’s supremo.
“A conspiracy is being hatched to tarnish my image. The rumour was spread earlier that I would quit the BJP. But the conspirators did not succeed, and now they circulated this vulgar video. I have lodged a complaint with the police and, if necessary, will move the Calcutta High Court too,” said Ghosh, who was also a national vice president of the BJP.
Though Ghosh has been sulking after being allegedly sidelined within the BJP’s unit in West Bengal, the party’s new state chief, Shamik Bhattacharya, recently reached out to him.
Ghosh, according to the BJP insiders, is now keen to contest from Kharagpur assembly constituency in Medinipur in the next year’s polls, replacing Hiran Chatterjee, who won the seat for the party in 2021 and is known to be loyal to Adhikari.
The vulgar video circulated online, however, came as a setback for the BJP high command’s move to end the fight between the “old guards” and the “new imports” in the party’s West Bengal unit ahead of the 2026 assembly polls.