BJP asks state leaders to visit party workers ahead of polls

RSS to continue its 100% voter turnout campaign in assembly polls

Amit Shah, the new president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has devised an ambitious campaigning schedule for himself and party leaders of states slated for Assembly elections later this year. The centrepiece of the plan requires all state leaders or aspiring ones to visit at least two villages in each constituency and spend the night at a party worker’s home.

Haryana, Maharashtra, Jammu & Kashmir, and Jharkhand are slated to face Assembly polls later this year.

In Maharashtra, the BJP is confident of securing a majority along with its ally Shiv Sena. Shah met about two dozen groups of BJP workers from across the state during his visit to Nagpur late last week. The BJP chief was in Nagpur primarily to consult with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) brass.

In Jammu & Kashmir, the party has launched ‘Mission 44 +’, similar to its ‘mission 272+ for the Lok Sabha, with the objective to win 44 seats in the 87 member Assembly. The BJP won an unprecedented three of the state’s six seats and 32 per cent vote share in the Lok Sabha elections. Of the 87 seats, Jammu elects 37, Ladakh four and Kashmir 46. The BJP believes it could sweep Jammu as well as Ladakh, where it won the region’s lone Lok Sabha seat.

The party is also confident of winning in Jharkhand, where it won 12 of the 14 seats in the Lok Sabha elections. The BJP is likely to project a tribal and a non-tribal as its joint leaders to reach out to both sections of the population.

The party hopes to build on its Lok Sabha performance in Haryana. It bagged seven of Haryana’s 10 Lok Sabha seats. Its Haryana unit is convinced that the party should rework its alliance with Kuldip Bishnoi’s Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC). The HJC and BJP fought the Lok Sabha in alliance in Haryana, but HJC lost all the three seats it contested, including that of Bishnoi.

The BJP state unit has demanded that Bishnoi not be projected as the alliance’s chief ministerial candidate. They also want the seat-sharing formula — according to which both parties will contest 45 seats each in the 90-seats Assembly — be modified suitably to reflect the ‘changed scenario’ after the Lok Sabha elections.

Shah met leaders from the four states last week. According to sources, the message from the top BJP leadership to its current and aspiring state leaders was to spend as much time in villages. The central leadership advised state leaders to learn from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s life. As an RSS worker, Modi had visited each and every district of India and later even as the CM of Gujarat, he spent a night in nearly every village of Gujarat. Apart from this, the BJP is also looking at consolidating its gains from the Lok Sabha elections in Odisha and West Bengal. This, at least in West Bengal, has meant bolstering party structures by welcoming cadres of Left parties such as the Forward Bloc into the BJP. On Sunday, as many as 2,000 Forward Bloc workers and local leaders joined the BJP. According to sources, the RSS is likely to continue its campaign of ensuring 100 per cent voter turnout in the four Assembly states. As it did during the Lok Sabha polls, the Sangh will request the electors to exercise their franchise to choose a government that protects the interests of their state as well as the nation.