Dilip Ghosh, West Bengal president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said that his party will conduct a detailed analysis to ascertain the reasons for their defeat in West Bengal by-elections, the results for which were announced today. BJP lost all three seats to the Trinamool Congress, including the Kharagpur seat from which Ghosh had won as a lawmaker.
Ghosh added however, that the results hadn’t come as a complete surprise because everywhere the ruling party of a state is known to use the state machinery’s power to influence the state elections.
But he also “welcomed” the results saying that the people of West Bengal are more “mature” than elsewhere, and they have selected whatever they thought was right for them. He said that every election should be seen from a different perspective. People may have wanted Narendra Modi as their Prime Minister and perhaps that’s why they voted for BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, whereas these same people might have thought of giving a second chance to Trinamool Congress before overthrowing them in the next Assembly elections of 2021, Ghosh reasoned.
He alleged that his party was not allowed to work in all the three areas where it had been defeated, and added that funds were being held back at the panchayat level to disgrace the image of the BJP. The defeat today may be a direct outcome of that too, Ghosh said.
Meanwhile, BJP’s national general secretary, Kailash Vijayvargiya, accused Trinamool Congress of using the police to its advantage in the by-elections and said that BJP would have surely won if the elections were conducted fairly.
