Dilip Ghosh: The leader Bengal BJP needs, the controversies it does not deserve

Ghosh grabs the headlines more often than not for both popular and unpopular reasons

That Dilip Ghosh is a hugely popular BJP leader in West Bengal is probably a well-known fact by now. A man characterised by his swaggering political bravado along with a penchant for controversy, Ghosh grabs headlines more often than not for both popular and unpopular reasons. In the last few years, the Bengal BJP chief has been instrumental in forming a strong organisational base of the party in the state. The saffron party is banking on his leadership skills to breach the Bengal fortress in the upcoming Assembly election.

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Born in the Kuliana village of Paschim Medinipur district, Ghosh began his political career as the 'pracharak' of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1984. It was a tumultuous year in Indian politics, as it witnessed the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Congress' landslide victory in the Lok Sabha election.

He was the in-charge of RSS in Andaman and Nicobar Islands from 1999 to 2007 and worked as an assistant to former RSS chief Kuppahalli Sitaramayya Sudarshan. But the graph of his political career would finally begin to rise upwards in 2014 when he was inducted into the BJP and was made the General Secretary of the West Bengal BJP. In 2015, Ghosh became the president of the West Bengal BJP, a decision that shaped BJP's subsequent journey in the state.

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Ghosh made his electoral debut in the 2016 West Bengal Assembly elections when he decided to contest from Kharagpur Sadar constituency in Paschim Medinipur. His opponent was Gyan Singh Sohanpal of Congress, who had won the assembly seat seven times in a row from 1982 to 2011. The odds were against Ghosh, but he came out with flying colours in the end.

Ghosh's effort in building the party's image in the state from scratch received great applause when BJP bagged 18 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election in Bengal. To put it in perspective, the party won 18 Lok Sabha seats out of the total 42 constituencies in the state with 40.25% votes. Ghosh himself won the Medinipur Lok Sabha constituency by a margin of 88,952 votes and a vote share of 48.62% by defeating TMC's then-popular leader Manas Bhunia.

Even though speculations were rife that Ghosh would contest the upcoming Assembly election despite being a Member of Parliament, he has refuted the rumour and clarified that he will supervise BJP's election campaign in the state instead.

Apart from his political success, Dilip Ghosh is also known for dishing out controversial statements.

In September 2019, he called the students of Jadavpur University 'anti-nationals' and 'terrorists', and insinuated that BJP would conduct a 'Balakot-like surgical strike' on the JU campus to 'drive out the communists'.

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In February 2020, while commenting on the anti-CAA protests in Delhi's Shaheen Bagh and Kolkata's Park Circus, he said, “Poor, unaware people have been made to sit on the roads. In return, they are receiving money every day. They are being fed biryani bought with foreign funds. All this is being done to show that people are with them."

He made another bombastic statement in January 2020 over the Shaheen Bagh agitation. He started by mentioning Mamata Banerjee's claim that many people died during demonetisation after standing in the queues for hours. And then he added, “We do not know if anyone died anywhere. What surprises me is that people were dying after standing in queues for merely two to three hours but now women and children are sitting at Shaheen Bagh for so many days and it is so cold out there! It’s barely 5 to 6-degree centigrade out there. Yet nobody is dying. I wonder what Amrit they may have consumed."

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Even Goddess Durga was not spared of Ghosh's wordstrikes. According to an India Today report, while speaking at the India Today Conclave on February 2021, he said, "Lord Ram was an emperor. Some consider him an avatar (incarnation). We know the names of his ancestors. Do we know the same about Durga? So, he is considered Maryada Purushottam. In Bengal, we have the Bengali version of Ramayana too. So Ram is an adarsh purush, Maryada Puroshottameven. Even Gandhiji spoke about Ram Rajya."