KOLKATA: The heat of Bengal BJP’s internal rift over selection of the party’s youth wing state committee and district presidents reached the party’s national headquarters.
Saumitra Khan, the state chief of the party’s Yuba Morcha, was summoned and he reached Delhi on Tuesday to meet the party’s national leadership, including the in-charge of BJP's organisational affairs in Bengal.
Sources in the Bengal BJP said national leadership was not happy with the row between Khan and the party’s state president Dilip Ghosh over the formation of the state committee of the youth wing. Earlier, Khan had announced the names of the youth wing’s district presidents and Ghosh disapproved them.
Khan was asked to meet Kailash Vijayvargiya and Shivprakash in Delhi two days ago after he had released the names of the state committee members of Yuba Morcha. Vijayvargiya is the BJP’s national general secretary and in-charge of West Bengal and Shivprakash is the national joint secretary (organisation).
In June, Khan, an MP from Bankura’s Bishnupur, had defected from Trinamool Congress before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He assumed the office of the president of the state chapter of BJP youth wing and since then he and Ghosh have been at loggerheads over forming the new state panel of the youth wing. Both are pushing party workers of their choice.
After Khan published the names of youth wing’s district presidents and Ghosh shot it down, the state president of the party had openly said that the final call on the list was his prerogative.
The intra-party crack in BJP’s Bengal unit had surfaced prominently in end-July when senior party leader Mukul Roy expressed his discontent over Ghosh’s projection claiming victory in as many as 190 seats out of 294 in the 2021 Assembly elections. Roy left Delhi without attending subsequent meetings which were scheduled to be held in the next seven days.