RSS preparing the ground in West Bengal for BJP to reap electoral harvest

Over nine sultry April days, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has emerged as the principal opposition in West Bengal, with the BJP riding piggyback. It started with an intrepid display of organisational heft across the state on Ram Navami on April 5, drawing the battle lines. Then on April 13, in the South Kanthi assembly constituency, a former Left fortress now taken over by the Trinamool Congress, the BJP emerged as a strong second with 32% votes, indicating the marginalisation of the Left and the Congress.

The message is clear: the RSS means business in Bengal. BJP state president Dilip Ghosh himself is a 2015 inductee from the RSS. In the last decade, the RSS has spread across the state in a way that the BJP could never do as a political force. As the Left and Congress have shrunk, the RSS has grown: from 580 shakhas in 2011, it has about 1,500 shakhas now.

Ghosh also breaks the mould for BJP leaders from the state, often cast in the image of BJP founder-member Vishnu Kanta Shastri, an erudite and genteel, Kolkata-based professor of Hindi. Ghosh, a first-time MLA, is a rustic rabble-rouser, and is willing to do to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee what she did to the Left Front a decade ago.

If Mamata played the land-loser card then, Ghosh has the Hindutva card. Says Amal Mukherjee, political analyst and former principal of Presidency College: “Bengali Hindus are moving towards the BJP. The appeasement policies of the present government have left them infuriated.”



The Kanthi South results confirm BJP’s pole position. While the TMC won with 56% votes, BJP got 32%, reducing the CPI to third with 10%, and the Congress left with only 1.3%. It reaffirms BJP’s surge in the 2016 assembly polls, when its vote share touched 29%, up from 6% in 2011. In a show of defiance, RSS affiliates took out processions on Ram Navami, with participants, including children, bearing arms. Mamata attacked the saffron show. Soon after, 78 FIRs were lodged against BJP and RSS leaders across the state. Ghosh was booked for brandishing a sword. “Children were dressed up like Ram and Lakshman.

That is why they were carrying swords, bows and arrows. In India, grooms too carry daggers as part of wedding attire,” Ghosh told ET Magazine.

The RSS plans to move court if its members are arrested. “We will go to the Supreme Court, if needed, to get a uniform policy in Bengal. They have to take action if arms are displayed during Muharram processions too,” says Jishnu Basu of RSS.

CPM MP Mohammad Salim blames TMC: “The RSS and the TMC are on the same side. The TMC plays the same trick when there is a Muslim festival.” The first real test for BJP-RSS will be in June 2017, when more than 120 civic bodies go to the polls. The assembly polls are four years away in 2021, but Ghosh promises much for the BJP before that — in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.