New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has restored West Bengal’s presence in its national organisational leadership. The saffron camp has named oncologist-turned-politician Madhuchhanda Kar as a national vice-president and Alipurduar MP Manoj Tigga as a national secretary.
This comes after six years after the state had two prominent organisational faces in the party’s central team.
It is important to note that the appointments under BJP president Nitin Nabin come months after the party’s emphatic electoral breakthrough in the state, where it won 207 of the 294 Assembly seats in the polls, relegating the TMC to 80 seats.
The new appointments also have an element of political rehabilitation. Kar, who served as a state BJP vice-president under Sukanta Majumdar, was dropped from state president Samik Bhattacharya’s new team in 2025. She has now leapfrogged the state organisation to become a national vice-president.
Who is Manoj Tigga?
Tigga, a longtime BJP face from the Dooars and one of the party’s most recognisable tribal leaders in north Bengal, has moved in the opposite direction — from the state organisation to the national stage after a sustained electoral and organisational career.
The BJP has also appointed former Tripura chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb, one of the party’s key election managers in West Bengal, as a national general secretary, adding another link between the state’s recent electoral success and the new national team.
The last comparable elevation of West Bengal leaders came in 2020, ahead of the 2021 Assembly elections. BJP president J P Nadda had then appointed Mukul Roy as national vice-president and former MP Anupam Hazra as national secretary. Darjeeling MP Raju Bista was also made a national spokesperson.
That experiment was closely tied to the BJP’s aggressive Bengal push after its breakthrough in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, when it won 18 of the state’s 42 seats.
But the party’s failure to dislodge Mamata Banerjee’s government in 2021 altered the equation.
Roy returned to the Trinamool Congress, while subsequent organisational reshuffles gradually erased Bengal’s presence from the BJP’s national office-bearer structure.
“The latest appointments therefore amount to more than a routine organisational reshuffle. They reflect the BJP’s national leadership assessment that Bengal has moved from being an expansion project to a state where the party now has to consolidate power,” a senior state BJP leader said.
Madhuchhanda Kar:
Kar’s journey makes that point particularly sharply. A cancer specialist by profession, she had links with the RSS student wing ABVP during her student years but was not an active politician for several years thereafter.
She formally entered the BJP in 2020, initially becoming co-convenor of the party’s doctors’ cell in Bengal and soon joining the state executive.
She was made a state vice-president in 2022 under Majumdar but was left out of Bhattacharya’s state team three years later.
Yet she remained involved at the grassroots.
During the 2022 Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation elections, Kar reportedly worked as the BJP’s polling agent in Ward 39.
The experience was far removed from the conventional profile of a professional joining politics from an accomplished career: BJP sources recall allegations that she was pushed around and spat upon at the polling station, with a Trinamool-linked local political confrontation also being alleged.