How Good Is BJP's Warhead?

Dilip Ghosh’s vitriolic campaign has upset urbane Kolkatans, but has made him popular in rural Bengal. The former RSS pracharak is likely to become chief minister if the BJP manages to defeat the Trinamool Congress in the assembly elections

- Rabi Banerjee

In 1971, Gopivallabpur village of Paschim Medinipur district went the Naxalite way and became one of the many “liberated zones” in West Bengal.

A seven-year-old boy was among the few villagers who swam against the Naxalite tide. As class war raged around him, he told his father, a school teacher, that he wanted to join the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He was interested in sports, and had been drawn to RSS volunteers who were coaching the local boys in football, athletics and stick fighting, after school hours. They also told them about the lives of their leaders, about a political party called Jana Sangh and about its founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee.

All through his school years, the boy quietly worked for the RSS; his worried father kept it a secret from the villagers. When he turned 20, the young man left home to become a full-time RSS member. He seldom touched base with the family thereon.

Almost 40 years later, Dilip Ghosh is president of the BJP in West Bengal. His supporters say he will be the next chief minister. Election to the state’s legislative assembly is due in May, and Ghosh has already mounted an aggressive campaign to unseat Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress party.

Though the BJP has not named anyone as its candidate for chief ministership, Ghosh is seen as the frontrunner. He is a formidable man, a controversial figure, who has rarely balked at making inflammatory speeches and vitriolic verbal attacks against leaders of other parties. Some of his critics have called him “venomous”.