‘Mandir-masjid’ doesn’t impact polls, says Dilip Ghosh day after meeting Shah
Times of India | 2 January 2026
KOLKATA: BJP senior Dilip Ghosh, under whose watch the party notched up its highest ever Lok Sabha seat tally in 2019, increased the state unit’s discomfort level by several notches the very day after his “rehabilitation” in the presence of Union home minister Amit Shah.
“Mandir-masjid politics will not help increase the BJP’s vote,” Ghosh said on Thursday before taking a swipe at “recent entrants” to the party. “It takes some time to understand the party’s culture,” he said without specifying who the “recent entrants” were. Former Trinamool cabinet minister Suvendu Adhikari joined BJP just before the 2021 assembly poll.
Three years later, Ghosh — who was born in and started his political career from undivided Midnapore — was shunted out to fight the 2024 LS election from Burdwan-Durgapur constituency (he lost that fight). Ghosh referred to that “transfer” as well. “Was there any need for the party to nominate me from that seat? Everyone saw what happened,” he said.
Former state BJP president Ghosh met Union home minister Shah on Wednesday, during the latter’s 48-hour Kolkata visit. This was his first meeting with a central BJP senior in some months; Ghosh was not let anywhere near Shah or PM Modi during their recent visits to Bengal.
Ghosh met current state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya on Thursday afternoon before interacting with the media. He was keen to contest from his “home seat”, Kharagpur, in the 2026 assembly poll, he told Bhattacharya and sought permission for a three-day campaign in Kharagpur from Saturday.
Everyone was “a worker in the BJP”, Ghosh told the media after his Thursday’s meeting with Bhattacharya. “Recent entrants have the responsibility of understanding the party’s culture and proving their identity as BJP workers,” he added.
If all the barbs were aimed at some of his state unit colleagues, Ghosh’s other comment — on the ineffectiveness of the “mandir-masjid” model in electoral politics — would not be welcome in the party headquarters either; he mentioned the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya and the BJP’s poll reverses in the vicinity in the 2024 Lok Sabha poll. “Mandir-masjid issues do not impact poll results; the BJP would not have lost Faizabad (if that were so),” he said, adding that it would similarly be “wrong to assume” that Mamata Banerjee would win the assembly election just by constructing temples.
Ghosh, who was also the BJP’s national vice-president before his fall in the party hierarchy, had come under fire for visiting the Jagannath Mandir in Digha in May 2025 and meeting Bengal CM Banerjee there. “The temple does not belong to anyone else but the deity. There are thousands of temples in this country. Do we ask who built it before we visit? I went there as a Jagannath devotee,” Ghosh said on Thursday.
He also did not mince words on Thursday while talking about his isolation in his own party. “Baseless agenda-driven theories were floated and I was isolated. I am not afraid of getting lost in politics just by because I am seen with someone from another party. There are times in politics when a person is cornered and is not given a chance. I have told the central leadership this. I have faith in them,” he said.