Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Samik Bhattacharya was on Thursday officially declared the new president of its West Bengal unit.
Bhattacharya, who is also a Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament, will lead the saffron party into the 2026 assembly elections in the state. The party has been trying to improve roads for some time now.
In the 2021 assembly election, the BJP had won 77 seats in the 294-member Bengal assembly. Since then, the tally has come down to 65, with 12 seats lost either due to bypolls caused by the demise of MLAs or defections to the ruling TMC.
Bhattacharya, 61, was elected unopposed, with no other candidate filing nomination for the post by the stipulated deadline of Wednesday afternoon.
Only one nomination
The formal announcement came during a felicitation ceremony at Science City on Thursday, in the presence of senior BJP leader and former Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who handed over the certificate of election to Bhattacharya.
Prasad was the national returning officer for the election of the West Bengal BJP president.
“Only one nomination was submitted for the post of president of West Bengal and that is Samik Bhattacharya’s. I congratulate him,” Prasad said, handing him the certificate.
Bhattacharya submitted his nomination papers at the BJP’s state headquarters in Salt Lake on Wednesday afternoon, accompanied by outgoing president Sukanta Majumdar and Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly.
Bhattacharya now takes over at a crucial juncture, with the West Bengal assembly elections due in less than a year’s time.
Who is Samik Bhattacharya? An old RSS hand
Samik Bhattacharya has been associated with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s ideological mentor. In 2014, Bhattacharya won his first assembly election and was the only BJP MLA in the house ruled by the Trinamool Congress. He had won the Basirhat South assembly seat on a BJP ticket in a bypoll.
Only one nomination was submitted for the post of president of West Bengal and that is Samik Bhattacharya’s.
Bhattacharya’s rise is an indication of RSS focus in West Bengal in the run-up to the 2026 assembly election.
Bhattacharya is known for strong oratory skills and wide acceptability among both old and new BJP workers. He is often seen quoting poets in his speeches.
Ten new state heads
Since its internal polls started last year, the party has elected as many as ten new state heads and held elections for 28 states and union territories. This paves the way for electing a new national President, replacing JP Nadda.
However, the election of the national president will be conducted only after the successful completion of elections in key states like Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Delhi, and Haryana, among others.
“In Bengal, we started from a position where we were considered non-existent. But we never compromised on our ideology. Today, the people of this state have given us a position. The defeat of the TMC is imminent,” Bhattacharya said in his first address to party workers after taking over.
‘BJP in Bengal is not against minorities’
The people of the state have made up their minds to end the misrule of this corrupt TMC government in the next Assembly polls, he asserted.
Calling the 2026 Assembly elections a “fight for the existence of the culture, pluralism and heritage of Bengal”, Bhattacharya alleged that these values are facing a threat under the TMC rule.
“The BJP in Bengal is not against minorities but against the politics of violence and communalism,” he added.
Source:https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/who-is-samik-bhattacharya-the-new-bjp-chief-in-tmc-ruled-west-bengal-11751533369815.html