Dilip Ghosh (politician)
Dilip Ghosh a well-known politician from West Bengal. He is the incumbent Member of Parliament representing the Medinipur constituency in Lok Sabha and also currently serving as the 9th president of the West Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He is often referred as Naru Da.
Ghosh comes from the economically backward areas of Jungle Mahals and belongs to the Bengali Sadgop caste, a backward caste among Bengali Hindus.
Early life
Ghosh was born into a Bengali Sadgop family at Kuliana village near Gopiballavpur of Paschim Medinipur district, West Bengal. He was the second of the four sons of Bholanath Ghosh and Puspalata Ghosh.After completing his secondary schooling, Ghosh claims to have pursued diploma in engineering from a polytechnic college in Jhargram over an affidavit filed with the Election Commission of India; however the lone polytechnic institute in the region – Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar Polytechnic stated that Ghosh did not pass the diploma from the college between 1975 and 1990.
In 1984 at the age of 20, he formally joined Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist organisation as a volunteer.
Political career
Early Political Career
Ghosh started his political journey as a “Pracharak” of RSS in 1984.He was the in-charge of RSS in Andaman and Nicobar Islands from 1999 to 2007, and worked as an assistant to former RSS chief K. S. Sudarshan. In 2014, Ghosh was loaned into BJP and was appointed as the General Secretary of the West Bengal unit. In 2015, Ghosh was appointed as West Bengal State President of the BJP.Ghosh started his electoral debut in 2016 contesting the West Bengal Legislative Assembly from Kharagpur Sadar,He won in the Kharagpur Sadar constituency of Paschim Medinipur district by defeating his nearest rival Gyan Singh Sohanpal, an Indian National Congress candidate. Gyan Singh Sohanpal of Congress had won the Kharagpur Sadar assembly seat seven times in a row from 1982 to 2011.
In September 2016, Ghosh went on a BJP-sponsored seven-day trip to USA, to highlight "oppression" of the Hindus in West Bengal and infiltration of Muslims from Bangladesh; other speakers in the programme were Subramanian Swamy and Hukum Singh.
Ghosh won the Medinipur Lok Sabha constituency in the 2019 Lok Sabha General Elections by a margin of 88,952 votes and a vote share of 48.62% by defeating Trinamool Congress candidate Manas Bhunia. In August 2019, Ghosh accompanied Ramnath Kovind to an official seven-day visit to the African countries of Benin, The Gambia and Guinea as a part of the official Indian delegation, which also consisted of Pratap Chandra Sarangi, the Minister of State in the Government of India for Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries and Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.
He launched a political campaign Chai Pe Charcha where he spoke to people while sipping tea. He was attacked on one such campaign on August 30, 2019 in Kolkata's Lake Town area allegedly by Trinamool Congress workers.
In January 2020 Dilip Ghosh was re-appointed as West Bengal BJP president.
Positions Held
Elected Offices
Political Offices
Controversies
- In May 2016, he raised a controversy when he said girl students of Jadavpur University "below standard and shameless who are always in search of opportunity to be in the company of male students".
- In August 2019, he declared that the Trinamul Congress workers’ families would be wiped out if he would start killing them. Triggering controversy, he even ordered his party workers rather to take revenge against TMC and even the police through violence.
- In September 2019, terming the Left and ultra-Left students of Jadavpur University “anti-nationals" and "terrorists", he insinuated that his party would conduct a “Balakot-like surgical strike” on the JU campus to “drive out the communists”. He also courted controversy when he attacked "few intellectuals" for having beef on roads and asked them to consume 'dog meat' at their homes.
- In December 2019, he was embroiled in a controversy when he said his party allows people to create trouble because the media looks for news. He drew criticism when he turned away an ambulance which tried to make way through a rally he was addressing in Nadia. While the ambulance was actually carrying a patient. He claimed that " TMC are doing it purposely. It is their tactic to disrupt the rally".
- In January 2020, he again raised controversy by remarking that West Bengal has turned into hub of anti-nationals. He also courted controversy when he said anti CAA intellectuals are 'devils' and 'parasites' who don't know about their parents.
- On January 28, 2020, he raised another controversy when he questioned why nobody was dying at the Shaheen Bagh protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act when several people had lost their lives waiting to withdraw money from banks during the demonetisation initiative over three years ago. "What surprises me is that people were dying after standing in line for two to three hours. But now women and children are sitting in temperatures as low as 4-5 degrees Celsius but nobody is dying! What nectar did they have? I am astonished! What is their incentive ?" he said at an event organised by the Kolkata Press Club.
- On January 30, he courted yet another controversy with his remark stating that, "Unless you visit jail, you cannot be a political leader", which is true in India. His comments drew widespread criticism from opposition parties when a lone woman carrying anti CAA poster was heckled by his partyman. Later while speaking to newsmen, Ghosh justified the heckling of the woman saying "Our men did the right thing. She should thank her stars that she was only heckled and nothing else was done to her".
- On February 16, he raked up yet another controversy with his remark on anti CAA protesters. He said, "some uneducated, unaware, poor people have been lured with money and are being fed Biryani with foreign funds to continue with the protests.”
- On May 29, his remarked on migrants sparked fierce backlash from oppositions. He said, the death of migrants returning home on Shramik Special trains are "small and isolated" incidents, and the Indian Railways cannot be blamed for it.