Former West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh was conspicuous by his absence during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent two-day visit to the state, skipping the public meetings in Malda and Singur. However, Ghosh said he met the Prime Minister briefly at Kolkata airport on January 18, as Modi was preparing to depart.
“Yes, I met the Prime Minister. I had gone to the airport to see him off, and we had an interaction,” Ghosh told The Indian Express. A senior party leader said the two leaders “enquired about each other’s health”.
Ghosh was once the BJP’s face in West Bengal, but his role diminished after he was dropped as state party chief in 2021 after failing to unseat the Trinamool Congress (TMC). However, in December last year, he was invited by Union minister Amit Shah to a meeting of senior leaders to review the party’s preparedness for the upcoming Assembly polls.
According to a party source, PM Modi and Ghosh spoke on state politics and the current situation in Bengal. The Prime Minister, sources said, asked Ghosh to actively participate in election campaigning and said that the state BJP leaders have to ensure that a double-engine government is in place.
A meeting with Amit Shah last month
In December 2025, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who was on a three-day visit to West Bengal, invited Dilip Ghosh to a meeting. Shamik Bhattacharya, Suvendu Adhikari, Sukanta Majumdar, and the party’s central observers Sunil Bansal, Bhupendra Yadav, Biplab Deb, and BL Santosh attended the meeting.
BJP sources said the quartet of state BJP chief Samik Bhattacharya, two former state presidents Ghosh and Majumdar, and Leader of Opposition in Assembly, Adhikari, will form the core team to lead the party in the election.
According to sources, Shah’s strict instruction to party leaders was to keep all their differences aside and work together as a team of four top leaders, who would “lead the BJP towards their target of winning the Assembly polls”.
Sources added that Ghosh has huge ground-level support and is very popular among the party’s grassroots workers.
Later, Ghosh was seen holding a meeting with Bhattacharya at the BJP party office and chalking out the blueprint for the upcoming Assembly elections. Ghosh has also been campaigning in various districts.