The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday appointed Union Home Minister Amit Shah as the main observer and Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi co-observer for the election of its legislature party leader in West Bengal. Former party President JP Nadda has been appointed observer and Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini his co-observer to oversee the process in Assam, signalling tight central control in States where internal equations remain delicate.
The Chief Minister and the new Cabinet are expected to take oath on May 9 in West Bengal. The decision to appoint the Home Minister, with the authority and awe he commands in the BJP organisation, builds on a strategy that proved decisive during the campaign. Shah camped in the State for days, staying across regions, holding ground-level meetings with workers and ironing out organisational problems. That sustained intervention was backed by a wider team. Sunil Bansal and Bhupender Yadav worked on organisational issues and worker deployment, while Dharmendra Pradhan led community outreach across regions. Former Trupura CM Biplab Kumar Deb focused on micro-level mobilisation in the former Left bastions.
State unit President Samik Bhattacharya played a key role in brokering peace within a unit that had appeared fractured, managing to bring strongman Suvendu Adhikari and former State BJP unit President Dilip Ghosh on the same page during the polls.
constant supervision
The emphasis, as the campaign showed, was on managing differences through constant supervision and clear role definition. That approach was shaped by the party’s experience in 2024, when internal contradictions had spilled out into the open. After the 2024 Lok Sabha setback, when the BJP came down from 18 seats in the 2019 elections to 12 seats, Dilip Ghosh publicly cautioned against sidelining “old karyakartas”, remarks widely seen as aimed at Suvendu Adhikari’s growing influence. The exchange laid bare a deeper divide between the BJP’s original organisational base and its newer political entrants, turning what had been a managed tension into visible discord.
The Central leadership’s direct intervention during the just-concluded elections, through Shah’s repeated visits and the deployment of Bansal, Pradhan and others, helped restore a working equilibrium ahead of the Assembly polls. Leaders were assigned distinct spheres of influence — Adhikari as the principal mass mobiliser, Ghosh as the organisational anchor, and others tasked with regional and social outreach. The result was a functionally cohesive but structurally diverse unit.
It is this balance that now faces its most consequential test. With government formation under way, the BJP must move from a campaign built on distributed authority to a clear leadership hierarchy. The appointment of Shah and Majhi as observers reflects an awareness that the fault lines seen in 2024 have not disappeared, and that the transition from victory to governance could reopen them.
immediate task
For the BJP in Bengal, the immediate task is to ensure that the choice of the Chief Minister does not expose the organisational faultlines again and eclipse the massive mandate. With his authority and presence, Shah is the only leader who can be trusted to ensure that the coalition of leaders painstakingly held together during the campaign does not come apart at the moment of power.
Published on May 5, 2026