Bengal BJP workers take shelter in safe houses after polls: ‘Election for us means season of leaving home’

Sitting on one of a dozen beds laid out on the third floor of the BJP office in West Bengal’s Baruipur town, 38-year-old Prasanta Haldar says, “Election season mane amader ghor chharar season (election season for us means the season of leaving home).”

Haldar, a BJP worker from the Vidyadhar Palli area of Baruipur, under the Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency, left home with his wife and children a day after casting his vote on June 1. While the wife and kids were sent to a relative’s house, Haldar and around 50 others like him took shelter 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, and for many, this is not the first time – they did the same after the 2021 Assembly polls, and the 2023 panchayat polls.

The Calcutta High Court on Thursday directed the West Bengal Police to open a new email ID for victims of post-poll violence to register their complaints.

Also on Thursday, Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP MLA from Nandigram, said in a letter to Governor C V Ananda Bose that 10,000 BJP workers and their families were in safe houses – many of them party offices – after the results of Lok Sabha elections were announced.

The Indian Express visited two such safe houses – one in Baruipur and one in Kolkata.

At the Baruipur party office, Haldar and others were huddled in a hall on Friday, watching TV as Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a speech from New Delhi. The halls had big cutouts of Modi, Amit Shah, and the BJP’s Jadavpur candidate Anirban Ganguly. The TMC’s Saayoni Ghosh defeated Ganguly by 2,58,201 votes in the Jadavpur seat.

“I was forced to leave home in 2021 after the