West Bengal assembly elections: Protests erupt in Hooghly over BJP list

CHINSURAH/KOLKATA: Simmering resentment within BJP over candidate selection spilled onto the streets of Hooghly on Monday, with angry party supporters ransacking the BJP district office in Chinsurah and putting the Chandernagore party office under lock and key.
Party old guards from Singur threatened to take the “ultimate course” if the BJP brass didn’t replace 88-year-old candidate Rabindranath Bhattacharya, a former minister who joined the party just days before the nominee list was released.
BJP supporters, led by a local leader, Santosh Pandey, had “mobbed” party observer and Madhya Pradesh health minister Vishwal Sarang at a private lodge in Apurbapur on Sunday, minutes after Bhattacharya was given a ticket.
On Monday, a BJP worker, Nirupam Mukherjee, made a failed suicide bid on railway tracks, fearing that a former Trinamool Congress strongman who recently joined the BJP, Debaprasad Biswas, may get the ticket from Hooghly’s Saptagram.
BJP veteran Krishna Bhattacharya from Konnagar has started writing graffiti, projecting herself as an independent candidate from Uttarpara against the “corrupt and tolabaj” official BJP candidate without naming Prabir Ghoshal, who switched loyalties from Trinamool to BJP.
Trinamool leaders in Hooghly were amused at the wrangling match within the “country’s largest party” that had planned to make hay of Trinamool desertions while Bengal BJP leaders went into damage control mode to pacify the ranks. Most Hooghly seats go to polls on April 6 and 10.
At Chandernagore’s Bagbazar More, angry BJP supporters took out a rally on Monday afternoon demanding that local candidates be given a chance after the party gave a ticket to Bengal BJP office-bearer Dipanjan Guha.
BJP old guard Tandra Bhattacharya, fighting elections in Bengal since the days of the late Tapan Sikdar, a minister in the AB Vajpayee government, said: “I fail to understand the logic behind candidate selection. None from the party told us about it; forget taking feedback.”
To make matters worse for the BJP, former Kolkata mayor Sovan Chatterjee and his friend Baisakhi Banerjee quit BJP on Sunday, minutes after Sovan was denied ticket from Behala Purba assembly seat and Baisakhi was kept out of the list.