BJP to launch 'Modi for PM' campaign soon

The BJP will soon launch a "Modi for PM" campaign to reach out to around 100 million households seeking their votes and donations, party leader Ananth Kumar said Tuesday.

"His (Narendra Modi's) image will attract voters," Ananth Kumar told reporters after a meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) parliamentary board, headed by party chief Rajnath Singh, here.

"We will seek votes and donations ranging between Rs.10 and Rs.1,000 from around 100 million households across the country," he said.

The idea, he said, was taken from the JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) movement of the 1970s.

Party veteran Lal Krishna Advani, its prime ministerial nominee and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi besides four BJP chief ministers -- Shivraj Singh Chouhan of Madhya Pradesh, Raman Singh of Chhattisgarh, Vasundhara Raje of Rajasthan and Manohar Parrikar of Goa -- also attended the meeting.

Leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj and her Rajya Sabha counterpart Arun Jaitley were also there.

Rajnath Singh reviewed the party's electoral success in the recent assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan and asked the chief ministers to keep up the momentum in the run-up to the 2014 national polls.

As part of the 2014 campaign, the party will complete meetings of booth-level workers by Feb 28 in 450 Lok Sabha constituencies across the country, said Ananth Kumar.

The BJP will also celebrate Dec 25, the birthday of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as "good governance" day and highlight the achievements of the National Democratic Alliance rule 1998-2004 and that of its state governments, he said.

"We discussed how to take the campaign forward," he said.

Noting "there is a situation like 1977 and widespread public anger against the ruling Congress", Ananth Kumar said: "People will present the BJP as a national alternative."

"The country is looking up to the BJP and Modi," he added.