West Bengal Assembly Election 2026 | ‘Killed because he worked for me’: Suvendu alleges vendetta after fourth associate’s death

Kolkata: Even as police continued investigating the murder of his aide, Chandranath Rath, Bharatiya Janata Party’s heavyweight in West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari, said on Thursday that had he not defeated Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee in Bhabanipur in the just-concluded elections, the incident would not have happened.

Rath was the fourth person associated with Suvendu to have died in mysterious circumstances. Earlier, Pradip Jha, his personal assistant, Subhabrata Chakraborty, his bodyguard, and Pulak Lahiri, his counting agent, had met unnatural deaths in 2013, 2018 and 2021, respectively.

The state BJP chief, Samik Bhattacharya, said that the murder of the aide Suvendu Adhikari was a political murder motivated by vengeance. “We can reply in the language of the TMC, but we wouldn’t,” he said. Adhikari, himself, too, urged the BJP workers to exercise restraint.

Soon after Rath was murdered late on Wednesday, the TMC issued a statement, condemned the incident, and demanded an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation under the monitoring of a court.

Rath, 42, was shot at by some assailants at Doharia in Madhyamgram in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal late on Wednesday. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where the doctors declared him dead. Buddhadeb Bera, the driver of the vehicle, also suffered serious injuries and underwent surgery at a hospital on Thursday.

The incident took place just two days after the results of the assembly elections in West Bengal were declared, and the BJP had a landslide victory, trouncing the TMC, which had been in power since 2011. Adhikari beat Mamata in Bhabanipur, apart from winning in his home constituency, Nandigram in Purba Medinipur, where he had defeated the TMC supremo in 2021. He is one of the frontrunners for the office of the chief minister of the state’s new BJP government, which would take over on Saturday.

Rath, who had earlier served the Indian Air Force and worked for a corporate organisation, has been a close aide of Adhikari from his days in the TMC, and continued to be with him even after he defected to the BJP.

“This is a very personal loss to me. He might not have been killed had he not been my personal assistant and had I not won from Bhabanipur,” Adhikari told journalists at a government hospital, where the post-mortem examination on the mortal remains of the deceased was conducted. His only fault was that he was my personal assistant. Five bullets were fired at him to ensure his death.”

Rath, who was well known within the BJP circle, was on his way to his home in Madhyamgram at around 10:30 p.m. when a car came in front of the SUV he was travelling in. As the SUV slowed down, one of the assailants, riding pillion on a motorcycle, came close to it and opened fire at him repeatedly at point-blank range. The abandoned car and one of the two motorcycles used in the attack were recovered, but both carried fake registration numbers with chassis details erased, police officers said, adding that the murder had been meticulously planned. A second motorcycle could not be traced yet. The bullet shells recovered from the spot indicated Glock pistols were used to shoot at Rath and Bera.

“This was a cold-blooded and well-planned murder,” said Adhikari, who rushed to the hospital after learning about the incident late on Wednesday.

Rath was on a phone call with Shankar Ghosh, a legislator of the BJP, when the assailants fired at him. They were discussing the preparation for Home Minister Amit Shah’s visit to Kolkata on Thursday and Friday, and the proposed visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the swearing-in ceremony on Saturday. “Suddenly, his voice changed. I heard some groaning sounds and then what seemed like gunshots. After that, there was silence,” said Ghosh, who called Rath again, only to be told by an unknown person that he had been shot.

The murder took place even as the election results triggered widespread violence across the state, with both the BJP and the TMC claiming that several of their workers had been killed by the workers of each other’s rival party. The TMC alleged that the BJP workers not only took over several of its offices but also carried out attacks on its supporters and their families at different places in the state.

Like Adhikari, Rath too hailed from Purba Medinipur. His body was taken to his home village in Chandipur after the post-mortem examination on Thursday. The BJP workers staged protests on the road after the news of his murder reached the village.

“I am a mother, I cannot demand a death sentence even for the assailants of my son, but I would want them to be caught and punished with life imprisonment,” said Rath’s mother, Hasi Rath, a panchayat-level politician, who had quit the TMC and joined the BJP following Adhikari in 2011.

When Adhikari had still been a TMC member in the Lok Sabha, his personal assistant and political secretary, Pradip Jha, had been found in an unconscious state on the pavement of Strand Road in Kolkata on August 3, 2013. He had been taken to a hospital where he had been declared dead. Adhikari’s bodyguard for nine years, Subhabrata Chakraborty of the West Bengal State Armed Police, had been found dead with a bullet injury on his head near the residence of the politician in Kanthi in Purba Medinipur on October 13, 2018.

After he left the TMC and joined the BJP, Adhikari had contested against Mamata in Nandigram in the 2021 assembly elections. One of his counting agents, Pulak Lahiri, had been found dead in mysterious circumstances then.