Sitting on one of the beds arranged on the third floor of the BJP office in Baruipur town, West Bengal, 38-year-old Prasanta Haldar remarks, “Election season for us means the season of leaving home.”
Prasanta Haldar, a BJP worker from Vidyadhar Palli in Baruipur under the Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency, left home with his wife and children a day after voting on June 1. He sent his wife and kids to a relative’s house while he and around 50 others sought refuge at the party office.
Amid allegations of post-poll violence, hundreds of BJP workers in West Bengal have left their homes and villages after the election. Many have experienced this before, having done the same after the 2021 Assembly polls and the 2023 panchayat polls.
The Calcutta High Court directed the West Bengal Police on Thursday to create a new email ID for victims of post-poll violence to file complaints. On the same day, Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly and BJP MLA from Nandigram, informed Governor C V Ananda Bose in a letter that 10,000 BJP workers and their families were in safe houses, many of which are party offices, following the announcement of the Lok Sabha election results.
Haldar and others at the Baruipur party office gathered in a hall on Friday, where they watched Prime Minister Narendra Modi deliver a speech from New Delhi on TV. Large cutouts of Modi, Amit Shah, and the BJP’s Jadavpur candidate Anirban Ganguly adorned the halls. However, the TMC’s Saayoni Ghosh secured victory over Ganguly by 2,58,201 votes in the Jadavpur seat.
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