Kamal Ghorui
NEW DELHI: West Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya on Sunday said the party has not decided on its chief ministerial face for the poll-bound state and will instead seek votes in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.The BJP’s move to field leader of opposition Suvendu Adhikari against chief minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee from the Bhabanipur constituency has sparked speculation about him being the principal opposition party’s CM candidate.Adhikari, a former TMC leader who joined the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly polls, is also contesting from his stronghold Nandigram. In 2021, he defeated Banerjee by a narrow margin of around 2,000 votes in Nandigram; she later returned to the assembly by winning a bypoll from Bhabanipur and retained the chief minister’s post.The TMC has repeatedly portrayed the BJP as a party of “outsiders,” a narrative that has worked to the ruling party’s advantage.“The BJP does not project anyone as the chief ministerial candidate. In Delhi and Haryana, who did the BJP project as the face? We did not. Yet we won. The same happened in Odisha. Whom did we project as the face? We did not fight those elections with any one face,” he told PTI.In Haryana, the BJP had a sitting chief minister, Nayab Singh Saini, during the October 2024 polls. Saini, who succeeded party colleague Manohar Lal Khattar in March that year, was retained in the top post after the party secured a third consecutive term, defeating the Congress.The BJP formed its first government in Odisha in June 2024 and returned to power in Delhi after nearly 30 years in February last year. In both places, it did not project a CM face, with Mohan Charan Majhi in Odisha and Rekha Gupta in Delhi being post-election picks.Bhattacharya, a Rajya Sabha MP, however, also left a small window open, saying the party’s top leadership remained free to take a “different call” later.“If, in the next few days, they (BJP top brass) decide to select someone and fight under that person, then that will be their decision. But at this moment, there is no such decision and I do not think there will be. We contest elections by putting forward ‘vikas purush’ Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom people from Kashmir to Kanyakumari trust, and by seeking votes on the basis of faith in his vision,” he added.Bhattacharya also expressed confidence that the BJP would secure a “comfortable majority”, though he declined to specify numbers or say whether it would cross the two-thirds mark.In 2021, the BJP recorded its best-ever tally of 77 seats, up from just three in 2016, but fell well short of its target of 200.On the other hand, Banerjee, who has been in power since 2011, led the TMC to a third consecutive victory, winning 215 seats in the 294-member assembly.West Bengal will go to the polls on April 23 and 29, with counting scheduled for May 4.
