BJP’s membership drive shows significant gains in north Bengal

Shubhadeep Choudhury
Tribune News Service
Kolkata, August 24

The Bharatiya Janata Party's recent recruitment drive showed that the party was steadily gaining ground in West Bengal’s northern districts—a trend that the recent Lok Sabha elections had clearly thrown up.

The drive that ended on Tuesday showed that five of the 10 districts where the party made most gains were from north Bengal.  Jalpaiguri in north Bengal showed the most promise for the BJP—the party’s enrolment figures show it has 4.4 lakh new members in the district against the targeted 2.9 lakhs.

Dakshin Dinajpur, also in the north, came next with 2.62 lakh new members—some 85,000 more than the party’s target.

Other north Bengal districts in the list were Alipurduar, Siliguri and Malda.

What’s more interesting however is that Darjeeling, a constituency that BJP wrested from the Trinamool Congress with a margin of 4.13 lakh votes, wasn’t one of the top 10—a possible indication that the party’s won because of the support it got from Gorkha parties like Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) and Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF).

In Bengal’s south, the BJP appeared to make most gains in Purulia—an expected development considering the party's victory in the constituency in Lok Sabha elections and, before that, its performance in the panchayat polls last year.  With 4.35 lakh new members against a target of 3.05 lakh, Purulia is third on the BJP’s list, coming just behind Jalpaiguri and Dakshin Dinajpur. 

Purulia made national headlines during panchayat elections last year when the BJP had accused the Trinamool Congress of having killed two people for “supporting” the party.

BJP meanwhile plans to enrol one crore people in West Bengal by the end of the year—the party already has 77.30 lakh members in the state. Members enrolled after August 20, however, cannot vote in the intra-party elections scheduled for later this year.