Kolkata: BJP veteran Tathagata Roy has not held himself back in his memoir from taking a swipe at Kailash Vijayvargiya, Dilip Ghosh and two other functionaries whom he blamed for the party’s poor show in the 2021 West Bengal elections.
Roy goes on to admit that he assumed the role of a “whistleblower” and turned to social media to express his views about the BJP after the 2021 poll results. In doing so, the former Bengal BJP state president mentions that he had left out the “truly sickening details” and confined to the “already-known”.
The book — ‘Desires, Dreams and Powers: Reminiscences of West Bengal and the Northeast’ — has Roy’s candid insights on how the BJP failed to dislodge the Mamata Banerjee government in 2021 even as it had the momentum of winning 18 out of Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats two years ago.
In the chapter named ‘Annus Horribilis (2021) and Hope (2023)’, the former Sangh insider tears into Vijayvargiya, Ghosh along with RSS functionaries Shiv Prakash and Arvind Menon for the adverse poll results.
“Kailash Vijayvargiya served as the general secretary of the central party, and hails from Indore, Madhya Pradesh. He was reportedly at odds with the top BJP leadership in MP, leading to his relocation to the central office in New Delhi and later to Kolkata. Without meaning any disrespect, the person had the visage of a chimpanzee with a drooping moustache, and when he talked normally one got the impression that he was grimacing. One’s looks do matter in politics,” Roy writes.
Shiv Prakash, according to Roy, was a “sensible person” facing a police case.
“Arvind Menon, once a sangh pracharak, was last posted in MP and appeared to be more fluent in Hindi than his native Malayalam. Interestingly, he married a girl half his age after his release from West Bengal,” he writes.
A RSS pracharak known to be close to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Menon was brought up in Varanasi. Fluent in Bengali, he was dispatched to the eastern state after his work helped the BJP gain power in Uttar Pradesh in 2017.
Menon and Prakash are said to have set the framework for the BJP in Bengal. Prakash had come to prominence for his work in western Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
“Dilip Ghosh was also a sangha pracharak, a vibhag pracharak before he was seconded to the BJP. He had worked in West Bengal and the Andaman Islands. His education was only up to the higher secondary standard, and he had a fitter mistry’s certificate from an industrial training institute.
“There are allegations that he falsified his qualifications, as he declared in the affidavit filed before the 2014 assembly election that he held a diploma in engineering from Jhargram Polytechnic. The polytechnic denied this claim. These four formed the quartet on whom the central BJP leadership, in its wisdom, had reposed the job of winning the 2021 elections,” Roy mentions in his book.
The former governor of Tripura and Meghalaya then gives insight into how the Kailash Vijayvargiya-led quartet controlled the BJP’s election machinery in Bengal, “determined to run it with complete newcomers, a few ‘paratroopers’ and a Hindi-speaking crowd.”
“Side by side, the quartet also decided to completely sideline the old BJP workers and local leaders (karyakartas, as they are called in party parlance), who had been with the party before 2014,” he adds.
Roy also claims in his book that the BJP failed to recognise the real issues on ground to take on the TMC which had carefully crafted its elections, and showered praises on political strategist Prashant Kishor.
He writes that as soon as elections results were out, he was shocked to see Vijayvargiya accept defeat at noon on camera that demotivated many polling workers who left the counting station in the early rounds of counting in 2021.
After the results were declared, the BJP ended with only 77 out of the total 354 seats in the Bengal assembly.
“When I witnessed the magnitude of the disaster, the departure of three members of the quartet, the paratroopers’ flight, and Dilip Ghosh’s ‘three to seventy-seven’ logic, I realized that the time for keeping my mouth shut was past. So, I assumed the role of a whistleblower and turned to social media, specifically Twitter (now known as X), to express my views. Even in doing so, as I mentioned earlier, I did not reveal the truly sickening details within my knowledge. Instead, I confined myself to compiling and presenting already-known,” he reminiscences.
Roy adds, he had foreseen his meeting with the central leadership, and it came true during an hour-long meeting with BJP president J.P. Nadda in New Delhi. “I do not know if it had anything to do with this meeting, but shortly thereafter, in September 2021, Dilip Ghosh was asked to resign from his post and was replaced by Sukanta Majumdar.”
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‘Mamata started grumbling’
The BJP veteran’s interactions with TMC chief Mamata Banerjee as an ally stands out in the chapter named, ‘Politics in the new millennium.’
An episode from 2003 is mentioned when the BJP and the TMC were fighting together against the CPI-M in the Bengal panchayat elections. Returning from a joint programme, he says, Mamata asked him to accompany her in a Maruti 800 car along with a TMC MP.
“We passed (CPI-M leader) Anil Biswas’s car less than five minutes after we left the junction. For no apparent reason, Mamata started grumbling, ‘See how he passed us, doesn’t consider us human!’ Then she fell silent but started again after five minutes, ‘I think he wanted to hit our car sideways! He wanted to overturn our car and go into the ditch below. I am sure of that!’ Now she got excited from her own grambling.”
Roy adds that Mamata instructed her MP to dial the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and later L.K.Advani, and ultimately asked her office to send a fax to both Vajpayee and Advani as well as the DM and the SP of Hooghly.
Another anecdote revolves around the seat-sharing negotiations in his role as the Bengal BJP president with Mamata for the 2006 Assembly polls.
“Just as I was trying to make a point, she picked it up from her lap, pointed at it and asked, ‘Look, how do you find this?’ I saw it was a picture of a peacock (of all things), so I naturally said, ‘Very nice.’ Then I resumed my arguments, and she once again focused on her activity. Throughout, I felt that she was either not paying attention or trying to convey the impression that whatever I said did not matter. After some time, she would again pick up that book, show it to me and ask, ‘Do you like this?’
“This time, it was a drawing of what appeared to be a woman’s footprint. She asked if I recognized the footprints, and I said no. Whereupon, with a flourish, she declared, ‘These are the footprints of Adya Ma?’” he recalls.
Mamata had split with the NDA in 2001 and later returned in 2004 only to leave the BJP-led alliance after the 2006 Bengal elections.
Roy ends his book with the subsection ‘Hope’, saying Narendra Modi is the biggest asset of the BJP today even though it is not a “person-oriented” party.
“Teflon skin” PM, he writes, can do everything. “He can even pull West Bengal out of the morass into which we have sunk ourselves. I hope and pray that he does. We have reduced ourselves to such a state that without his help, it would be very difficult.”
Speaking to ThePrint, Roy mentioned that he began writing the book after the Bengal state election results and added that he was obliged to have former President Ramnath Kovind write the foreword of the book.
“I get the impression that in Desires, Dreams and Powers, Tathagata Roy has successfully merged the two kinds. In other words, his memoirs are personal reminiscences interwoven with informal history of the times and both are enjoyable,” Kovind writes in the foreword.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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