RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is scheduled to visit Bengal by the end of this month.
NEW DELHI: Apart from the 16 Lok Sabha seats that the BJP currently holds in West Bengal, the party is going to focus on 19 other seats in the state from which the party thinks it has a significant chance of winning in the 2024 Lok Sabha seats. The state has 42 Lok Sabha seats, incidentally in December last year, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had asked the party cadre in Bengal to win at least 24 seats from the state.
It is also pertinent to mention here that the BJP had won 18 Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 general elections; however, two of its MPs have moved to the Trinamool Congress in the last one year. The central BJP has drawn the list of 19 Lok Sabha seats from Bengal after getting feedback from the state on the presence of the BJP in these areas.
Sources in the BJP said that the list has been finalised after the BJP went into details with regards to the vote share and losing margin in these seats with regards to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. According to the list accessed by The Sunday Guardian, these 19 seats are Malda South, Krishna Nagar, Bolpur, Birbhum, Jayanagar, Mathurapur, Diamond Harbour, Dum Dum, Jadavpur, Kolkata South, Kolkata North, Howrah, Uluberia, Shrirampur, Arambagh, Tamluk, Ghatal and Burdwan East.
These were the seats, according to the BJP where the party had significant influence and had lost the seat by a thin margin. For example, in the Malda South seat the BJP lost to the Congress by less than 1% vote, while in the Krishna Nagar Lok Sabha seat the BJP lost to the TMC by 5% vote, while the BJP won the Krishna Nagar assembly seat in 2021 Assembly elections. In most of the Lok Sabha seats mentioned above the BJP lost by 5 to 10 percent vote share and the party thinks that it would be able to win these seats if they put in extra effort. However, the seven Lok Sabha seats which are not on the focus of BJP’s electoral strategy are Behrampur seat currently represented by Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdury, Basirhat, Barasat, Jangipur, Barrackpore, Kanthi and Murshidabad. To ensure that the party wins at least 8 to 10 of these 19 seats, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, National President of the BJP JP Nadda as well as the Prime Minister Narendra Modi would start frequenting these seats in the middle of this year.
“The party has planned extensive campaigns in these seats because our internal survey has shown that the BJP has significant chances of regaining itself in most of these seats. As per plans, J.P. Nadda is going to visit the state by the end of this month, Amit Shah is also scheduled to visit Bengal and stay for at least two days and visit many places in the state. The Prime Minister has also assured us to start visiting Bengal more frequently,” a senior BJP functionary from West Bengal told The Sunday Guardian. Apart from these leaders, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is also scheduled to visit Bengal by the end of this month for at least five days where he would be staying and interacting with cadres of both the BJP and the RSS and prepare them for the Lok Sabha elections. The RSS chief is also expected to meet influential people from Bengal who hold a say in Bengal. The party had also been doing Lok Sabha pravas (night stays) in several seats in Bengal where senior party leaders and Union cabinet ministers have been visiting and interacting with party leaders, grass root workers and the people at large explaining them about the work of the BJP and the Modi government. Senior ministers like Smriti Irani, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Dharmendra Pradhan, Hardeep Puri have visited the state already.