KOLKATA: West Bengal BJP president Sukanta Majumder has said his party will aim at winning at least 25 Lok Sabha seats in the state in the 2024 general election.
Majumder, after attending a BJP meeting, told reporters on Sunday that the saffron party has coined the slogan 'Ebar 25 paar' (we will cross 25 this time) keeping in mind the Parliamentary election.
"Twenty five is our minimum target in the next Lok Sabha polls from West Bengal. From 18 seats at present, we will gift at least 25 seats to (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi in 2024, he asserted.
The BJP clinched 18 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal in 2019, 16 more than it had managed in the 2014 elections.
Reacting to Majumder's assertion, veteran Trinamool Congress MP Sougata Roy said the BJP leader's claims show that he is inexperienced and has no idea of the ground reality.
"The BJP got 77 seats in the assembly polls, but with many of its MLAs having joined the TMC, the tally is effectively 70 now. By any arithmetic, the saffron party will not secure more than 10-11 seats in the Lok Sabha polls," Roy said.
Meanwhile, the saffron party's national vice-president Dilip Ghosh warned that the "agents who are still damaging the prospects of the BJP from within" will be thrown out.
Ghosh had earlier in the day said the BJP made a mistake by inducting a person like Rajib Bandyopadhyay in its fold.
In an explosive Facebook post the former BJP state president said, "Many agents had entered into our party before the assembly polls. Many of them have already left while others still remain and sabotaging the party."
"They don't want the BJP to become stronger. We will throw each of them out," Ghosh further said.
While he did not name anyone, Trinamool Congress MP Sougata Roy wondered if "Dilip Ghosh is at all taken seriously by his party considering he had been stripped off his post as state unit president and given a non-functioning post by the central leadership."
TMC state spokesman Kunal Ghosh said, "We don't know if Dilip Ghosh is referring to Suvendu Adhikari as an agent. But the Facebook post reveals the growing feud within the BJP which is falling like a pack of cards."
Bandyopadhyay returned to Trinamool from the BJP at a public meeting of Abhishek Banerjee in Agartala on Sunday and said he was repentant for crossing over to the BJP nine months back.