By Ananya Sharma 
New Delhi / Kolkata, March 31: Okay so here is something nobody in Kolkata is going to pretend they did not see coming.
Leander Paes joined the BJP today. Kiren Rijiju was there. Papers signed, photos taken, done.
For anyone who has been even half paying attention to Bengal politics this past week, the only genuine surprise today was that it took this long to make official. The hotel lobby meetings, the Delhi trips, the BJP leaders suddenly developing amnesia whenever a reporter asked them a direct question. It was all there.
The Week That Made This Inevitable
Cast your mind back to March 25. BJP national president Nitin Nabin was in Kolkata, two-day visit, staying at a hotel in New Town. That evening Leander Paes walked in. Samik Bhattacharya, the man who runs BJP’s West Bengal operation, was sitting right there in the room. Sources told NewsX at the time that the formal joining would happen in Delhi, and soon.
Then word got out that Paes had quietly travelled to Delhi and met Amit Shah personally. Kolkata24x7 reported it. Bengali outlets ran with it. After that the state BJP went into full radio silence mode. Not a word. No yes, no no, just absolutely nothing.
Anybody who grew up watching Indian politics knows that particular silence. It does not mean they are thinking about it. It means the thing is already decided and they are waiting for the right moment to announce it.
That moment was today.
Who Is This Man, Really
Let us just take a breath here and actually talk about Leander Paes the sportsman, because there is a real risk that the political story swallows everything else, and that would be a shame.
He was born in Kolkata, June 17, 1973. His father Vece Paes played hockey for India at the 1972 Munich Olympics. His mother Jennifer Paes was the captain of India’s women’s basketball team at the 1980 Asian Basketball Championship. So this was not a family where sport was a hobby. It was the family business, the family language, the family religion almost.
He went professional in 1991. Then five years later came the moment that an entire generation of Indians remembers.
Atlanta, 1996. Olympic Games. Leander Paes, a kid from Kolkata, walks onto a hard court and wins a bronze medal in men’s singles tennis. His wrist was messed up through a big chunk of the tournament. He won anyway. And here is the part that really puts it in perspective. Before that day, no Indian had won an individual Olympic medal since K.D. Jadhav in wrestling back at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Forty-four years. That is how long the country had been waiting.
People who watched that final bronze medal match live will tell you about it unprompted even today. It is that kind of memory.
After Atlanta, Paes teamed up with Mahesh Bhupathi and the two of them became arguably the most famous sporting partnership this country has ever produced. The press called them the “Indian Express.” They went to world number one in doubles. In 1999 they became the first Indian pair ever to win a Grand Slam, winning the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year. That same year they reached the final of all four Grand Slams, something that had never happened to any pair before in the Open Era. Britannica has it documented.
Now the Paes-Bhupathi relationship was famously complicated. If you followed Indian tennis in those years you already know the stories, the fallouts, the reunions, the drama. But even when the partnership was off, Paes kept winning. Different partners, different continents, didn’t matter. Czech men, American women, legends like Martina Navratilova and Martina Hingis. He won the 2012 Australian Open and completed a full career Grand Slam in men’s doubles. Did the same in mixed doubles by 2016. Eighteen Grand Slam titles total. Eight different partners. Across four actual decades of professional tennis.
Seven Olympics in a row. From Barcelona 1992 all the way to Tokyo. Just sit with that number.
Last year in July 2024, he walked into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, and became the first Asian man in history to be inducted there.
Khel Ratna. Padma Shri. Padma Bhushan. He has the lot.
So no, this is not some faded celebrity doing a photo opportunity with a political party. This is legitimately one of the greatest sportspeople this country has ever produced. That distinction matters.
But He Has Been Down This Road Before
This is the part that deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Leander Paes is not new to political parties. In October 2021 he joined the Trinamool Congress in Goa. Mamata Banerjee came personally for the joining ceremony. By multiple accounts she called him a “younger brother” right there in front of the cameras. Warm, celebratory, big smiles all around.
He then went and campaigned for the TMC ahead of the 2022 Goa elections.
TMC won zero seats in Goa. Not one. The whole Goa project for Trinamool collapsed like a house of cards and Paes just quietly disappeared from their orbit. No big dramatic exit, no press conference, no statement. He was in the TMC, and then at some point he simply was not anymore, and neither side seemed in any hurry to explain exactly what had happened.
So the BJP gets to use this now, and they absolutely will. The woman who called him a younger brother, her party lost him. He chose the other side. That is a campaign line, and you will hear it at every single rally between now and polling day in Bengal.
What Bengal Actually Means For BJP Right Now
West Bengal has been the BJP’s great frustration for years. The 2019 Lok Sabha elections felt electric for them, 18 seats out of 42, real energy, real belief that the state was finally turning. Then came the 2021 Assembly Elections and Mamata Banerjee’s TMC crushed that momentum completely. State government stayed with TMC, BJP seat count collapsed, the whole thing was a tough night for the party nationally.
Bengal has been on the priority list ever since, simmering away.
Now the 2026 Assembly Elections are basically here. Voting on April 23 and April 29, results on May 4. BJP has already put out three rounds of candidate lists covering all 294 seats. Just yesterday, March 30, as The Week reported, a BJP delegation walked into the Election Commission, Rijiju included along with Piyush Goyal, Sukanta Majumdar and Anil Baluni, and formally complained that the TMC was intimidating voters ahead of the election.
So the campaign is already running hot. Into that environment, the party brings in Leander Paes.
A Kolkata-born man. A genuine Bengali icon. Someone who has no history in the murky factional politics of the Bengal BJP. Someone whose name makes ordinary people, people who have never gone to a political rally in their lives, feel something real and uncomplicated. That is a genuinely rare thing in politics and the BJP knows it.
Whether he actually fights a seat is still not confirmed. No constituency announced yet. But even as a face at rallies, even as someone who turns up and reminds voters of Atlanta 1996 and what this country felt that day, the value is clear.
One Small Detail That Tells You A Lot
Kiren Rijiju personally oversaw today’s ceremony. Right now Rijiju is Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and Minority Affairs. The sports ministry is not his brief anymore. But from 2019 to 2021 he was Minister of State for Sports and Youth Affairs and built real relationships in that world. The BJP specifically chose him for this moment. They did not send some state-level party worker to manage the paperwork. They sent a Union Minister.
That tells you what they think this moment is worth.
The Honest Question Nobody Wants To Ask Out Loud
Here is the thing though. Indian politics has a long history of bringing in sporting legends and then watching nothing much happen. Being extraordinary at tennis, or cricket, or wrestling, it does not automatically mean you know how to run a constituency, manage a team of party workers, deal with local grievances, sit through three-hour meetings about drainage infrastructure. These are completely different muscles.
Paes is 52, he is smart, he speaks well, he has presence. Nobody is going to dispute any of that. But one unfinished stint with a party that got zero seats in the state where he campaigned is the entirety of his political experience. That is a thin file.
That said, maybe that is not what the BJP actually needs from him right now. Maybe they need something simpler and more human. They need him to stand on a stage in North Kolkata or South Kolkata and just be Leander Paes. The boy from this city who went out into the world and made India proud when India desperately needed something to feel proud about. The man who played through injury and won anyway. The man who kept showing up at Olympics long after other players had retired to commentary boxes and endorsement deals.
That story still lands. It lands with people who do not follow politics closely. And those are exactly the people every party is chasing in the final weeks before polling.
Whether any of this shows up in the actual seat count on May 4 is genuinely impossible to predict.
But today, on the last day of March, Leander Paes made his choice. The racquet has been away for years. The Hall of Fame is sorted. Now there is a new court, a very different kind of game, and Bengal is watching to see how he plays it.
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