BJP to hire ‘consultant’ in West Bengal to implement ‘Back-office’ strategy for Lok Sabha polls

The party has decided to engage Jarvis Technology & Strategy Consulting Private Limited for this purpose.

The state BJP has neither denied nor confirmed the development.

Bengal BJP: Ever since Prashant Kishor and Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG), an election campaign group he created, helped the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win an outright majority in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, there has been a trend of hiring of election strategists by various political parties to help and guide them in winning elections at various levels, the highest of which is the Lok Sabha election.

Now, it has been reported that the BJP’s West Bengal unit has decided to engage the services of a private agency to implement its “back-office strategy” in the state for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, which are tentatively scheduled are for March-April. 2024.

According to sources in the state committee of the BJP, the party has decided to hire Jarvis Technology & Strategy Consulting Private Limited for this purpose.

The move is seen as a counter to Mamata Banerjee’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), which has been hiring the services of the Prashant Kishor-founded Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) for electoral benefits since the 2021 assembly elections in West Bengal.

“There will be no conflict in the functioning of the state unit of the BJP and the private agency. While ground-level political campaigns and outreach programs will be carried out by the state leadership of the party, as per the directives of the central leadership, the work of the outsourced agency will include doing on-the-spot and back-up research and providing of additions to the state leadership so that political strategies can be put in place accordingly,” said a member of the state committee of the BJP.

Sukanta Majumdar, the state president of the BJP, has neither denied nor confirmed the development and has claimed that election strategies are “internal and confidential matters” that often cannot be made public.

Meanwhile, party insiders said that as per the initial plans, the consultancy firm will not only operate from Calcutta but also set up camp offices in different districts of the state.

The Legislative Assembly of West Bengal has 294 constituencies. In the 2021 elections, the TMC emerged victorious with 215 seats, while the BJP came a distant second with 77 seats.

West Bengal sends 42 Lok Sabha members to Parliament and in the previous general elections of 2019, the BJP put up a tough fight against the TMC, which won 18 seats while the latter got 22 seats.