Target is to win all 80 Lok Sabha seats of UP: Zadafia

BJP's newly-appointed Lok Sabha election in-charge for Uttar Pradesh Gordhan Zadafia on Thursday said his goal will be to win all 80 seats in the state and dismissed any grand alliance of opposition parties against the saffron party as an "exercise for survival".

Opposition parties like the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress will come together due to their fear of the BJP, said Zadafia, who once was a bitter critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during their Gujarat politics days.

Now as a chosen man by Modi and the party's president Amit Shah to deliver a rich harvest of seats from Uttar Pradesh, politically most crucial state which sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha, the influential Patel community leader from Gujarat told PTI, "My goal is to win 80 out of 80 seats in the state, nothing less than it".

He also hoped that Modi would again contest Lok Sabha election from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.

Incidentally, it was Shah who was the state's in-charge during the 2014 general elections and engineered the BJP's win in an unprecedented 71 seats.

Asked about his bitter relations with the party in the past, Zadafia said, "Individual politics can be played but individual's ego should not be bigger than the nation. Past have to be forgotten and it's now time to look ahead."