As BJP's membership drive falters in West Bengal, RSS nudges saffron party to find 'credible face' against Mamata Banerjee

Kolkata: With the Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal unit failing to meet the membership target set by its central leadership, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has subtly nudged the saffron party to have a "credible and charismatic face" to pose a formidable challenge to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress in the assembly elections in 2026.

Even as the membership campaign exposed the infighting and organisational weaknesses of the BJP in West Bengal, the RSS has tacitly conveyed its displeasure over the persistent failure of Sukanta Majumdar, the president of the party’s state unit, and Suvendu Adhikari, the leader of opposition in the state assembly, and suggested that the party should take a lesson from the political career of Mamata Banerjee herself and project a new ‘face’ to take on her.

An article published in ‘Swastika’, a magazine known as the RSS’s non-official Bengali mouthpiece, noted that it had taken Mamata Banerjee almost two decades to emerge as a reliable face against the Left Front, which had ruled the state from 1977. It underlined that Suvendu Adhikari, whom the BJP had projected as its face against the TMC supremo in the 2021 assembly elections, so far only had a stint of four years as the ‘face’ of the Opposition in West Bengal. The people of West Bengal want a credible face against Mamata Banerjee, the BJP would have to find one before its “Agni Pariksha” – the assembly elections in 2026, it noted.

The BJP could enrol only about 40 lakh members in West Bengal by Saturday, although Union Home Minister Amit Shah, during a visit to Kolkata on October 27, had set a target of registering at least one crore members. Though the party’s membership campaign ran from September 2 to November 30 across the country, its unit in West Bengal got several extensions.

Majumdar, who is also a union minister, triggered controversy by promising the women of West Bengal that the BJP’s membership would ensure benefits under the Annapurna Yojana, a scheme the saffron party had promised to roll out after its ascent to power in the state – to replace the popular ‘Lakshmir Bhandar’ scheme of the TMC government.

Shamik Bhattacharya, a BJP member in the Rajya Sabha, was entrusted with the responsibility of coordinating the membership campaign across West Bengal. He made news by enrolling the bride as a BJP member while attending a wedding ceremony on the outskirts of Kolkata. Adhikari, himself, sat in membership enrolment kiosks to encourage the party workers running the campaign.  

The campaign, however, remained sluggish in West Bengal till the last week of December 2024, when the repeated prodding by the central leadership could add some momentum to it in the state.

“We have enrolled 40 lakh members in the state and the number will cross the 50-lakh mark by January 10,” said Majumdar. “The quality matters, quantity doesn’t,” he added, vouching for the genuineness of all the new members enrolled during the campaign.

January 10 is the deadline the state unit has been given after the latest extension of time.

The RSS, according to the Sangh Parivar sources, conveyed to the BJP high command its displeasure over the party’s state leaders who could not take a prominent role during the widespread outrage against the TMC government in the wake of the rape and murder of a young doctor at a hospital in Kolkata on August 9 last year. The party could not reap any political dividends out of the protests. Mamata Banerjee’s party won all the six state assembly seats, where polling for the bye-elections was held on November 13, including one that was earlier in the BJP’s kitty.  

The BJP, which had emerged as the main opposition party in West Bengal in 2021, could not do well in the Lok Sabha elections, winning only 12 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats from the state – six less than its 2019 score. The TMC rather had a landslide victory, winning 29 seats. The Congress won just one LS seat from the state.