Kolkata: A day after the Kolkata Municipal Corporation election results came in, the BJP West Bengal unit went for a huddle on Wednesday to find out what went wrong with their plans. The dismal performance of the saffron camp has made it slip below the Left in terms of vote share.
None in BJP expected fabulous results in the KMC polls. But none expected the number of councillors to come to three as well getting pitted to the third position in terms of vote share. Precisely that is why after the results were declared the party’s national vice president, Dilip Ghosh said that the results had been as expected. Now party's internal findings have revealed that besides alleged violence by Trinamool Congress activists, some major strategic flaws in BJP’s West Bengal unit lead to the disaster.
The first flaw was over-dependence on the court on various KMC polls related issues instead of strengthening the organizational network and more focused campaigning. BJP state president in West Bengal and party MP Sukanata Majumdar said that a fact-finding committee has been constituted to review the reasons for the disastrous results. “The committee will submit its report shortly and only after that we will take corrective measures,” he said.
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BJP sources said that another major flaw as per internal findings is that BJP contested the KMC polls without any groundwork or preparations. “Since the party instead of countering Trinamool Congress from the ground-level concentrated more on legal steps, a major section of the voters refused to accept BJP as the alternative for Trinamool Congress,” a senior BJP leader said on condition of anonymity.
According to sources, another flawed approach was a hurried reshuffle in the rank and file of the party’s state unit after the assembly polls early this year. Sukanata Majumdar replaced Dilip Ghosh as the state president before the tenure of Ghosh came to end. “That reshuffle done in a hurry jumbled up everything,” the state BJP leader said.
A major flaw was although BJP gave poll responsibilities of 16 boroughs under KMC to 16 MLAs, none of them was aware of the ground realities of the boroughs, hence the campaigning process suffered and even a rally of Sukanta Majumdar had to be cancelled because of lack of crowd. “There was no star campaigner. Even the manifesto was directionless,” the state BJP leader said.
