West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | One family, two moods: Dilip Ghosh relents, but wife gives vent to ire over BJP's dynastic politics

Kolkata: They both were pouty. He, however, appears to have shaken it off. But she remains unrelenting and has now started giving vent to her sulks.

The party’s candidature from his favourite constituency, Kharagpur Sadar, and a public display of courtesy, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, with a friendly banter, made veteran Bharatiya Janata Party stalwart in West Bengal, Dilip Ghosh, come around and pause his subtle salvos to Suvendu Adhikari, the de facto chief ministerial face of the saffron party in the state, and others who joined the party after quitting the Trinamool Congress.

But his wife, Rinku Majumdar, who herself is a BJP worker, has now gone public, airing her disappointment with the party, which had not yet accepted her request for a ticket to contest the assembly elections.

The BJP state headquarters at Salt Lake in Kolkata on Sunday witnessed protests by the party workers from Hingalganj, who raised slogans opposing the candidature of Rekha Patra. Similar protests at the same venue were earlier seen against Partha Choudhury and Alok Halder, the BJP candidates in Beleghata and Joynagar, too.

Soon after the BJP declared him as its candidate in Kharagpur Sadar, Ghosh, now 61, started campaigning in the constituency against the Trinamool Congress’s Pradeep Sarkar.

Majumdar, however, has rather targeted the BJP’s state leaders, alleging hypocrisy over the party’s “One-Family-One-Ticket” policy. She publicly alleged that the norm, which was cited to turn down her plea for the BJP’s nomination in the Rajarhat New Town assembly constituency in Kolkata, was violated while giving the party’s tickets to Suvendu Adhikari to contest in Bhavanipur and Nandigram assembly constituencies, and to his brother Soumendu Adhikari in Egra.

Majumdar also pointed out that the BJP had also bent the “One-Family-One-Ticket” norm for Arjun Singh, a former Lok Sabha member, and his son, Pawan Singh, a member of the state legislative assembly. The BJP declared both senior and junior Singhs as the party’s candidates from the Noapara and the Bhatpara assembly constituencies.

Ghosh’s wife recently visited the West Bengal BJP headquarters at Salt Lake in Kolkata and conveyed her grievance to the state leaders of the party. “Our party, led by Narendra Modi, always took a stand against dynastic politics. But, here in West Bengal, we have seen several cases of more than one person from one family being given tickets by our party itself,” she told journalists, adding: “This has indeed upset me and made me wonder why I spent so many years of my life working for the party.”

The BJP fielded Piyush Kanodia at Rajarhat New Town, declining the plea of Ghosh’s wife.

She also alleged that the people who were accused of financial scams or who had lost the elections earlier had been declared the candidates of the BJP.

Ghosh, a former ‘pracharak’ of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, married Majumdar on April 18, 2025.

Modi, in a recent BJP rally, exchanged pleasantries with Ghosh and purportedly asked in jest why the former national vice president of the party had not sent sweets to him on the occasion of his wedding.

“She is a BJP karyakarta like me and has a right to seek a ticket. She did apply for the party’s candidature,” said Ghosh, adding: “It is the party’s prerogative to take a call on such applications”.

Ghosh 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 had been 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 Kirti Azad of Trinamool Congress.

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, 2025, but also had a courtesy meeting with the ruling Trinamool Congress’s supremo.

Though he was sidelined within the BJP for several months, and speculation was rife about his plan to join the TMC, Ghosh recently staged a comeback with the party offering him the candidature for the Kharagpur Sadar constituency.