Making a shift in strategy, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has decided to give prominence to local leaders in the campaign for Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.
The party has not only scaled down rallies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it has also included a few local leaders, with considerable clout, on the list of star campaigners, including Varun Gandhi, who were left out from the initial list for the first two phases.
Other star campaigners from UP, on the second list include Om Mathur, Swami Prasad Maurya (ex-BSP veteran), Raju Srivastava, Hema Malini, Mukthar Abbas Naqvi etc. At present, the campaign is primarily being led by Rajnath Singh, Kalraj Mishra, Uma Bharti and Yogi Adityanath, all from UP.
The PM is likely to address only 14 rallies during the seven-phase campaign for polling in 403 seats. This excludes seven rallies before the announcement of elections. This is in sharp contrast to his 31 election rallies during the Bihar Assembly elections, for 243 seats, in 2015.
It was believed that while Modi’s rallies attracted huge crowds in Bihar, absence of local leaders had a negative impact, which led to the party’s defeat. The party, said a source, does not want to take any chance and therefore has deployed local leaders for campaigning. As part of this strategy, the BJP has included Varun Gandhi, Murli Manohar Joshi and Vinay Katiyar, who were left out of the first list of star campaigners, on the second list. For the first phase, Modi is supposed to address one more rally in Agra on Sunday after the Saturday rally in Meerut, while Amit Shah undertook a padyatra in Meerut on Friday and Mathura on Saturday. As many as 73 constituencies across 15 districts of Western UP are set to vote on 11 February in the first phase. The party has high stakes from this region as it had won all the Lok Sabha seats in 2014.
Besides, the party has also left the election management with the state leadership. This is again in contrast with the Bihar elections where national president Amit Shah was camping in Patna throughout the elections there. “The entire planning for election campaign is being made in Lucknow under the eyes of state party president Keshav Prasad Maurya,” the source said. It has also deployed five BJP leaders having RSS background, from neighbouring Bihar and MP, to oversee the campaign. They are Nagendra Nath (general secretary organisation), Nand Kishore Yadav, Mangal Pandey (both former state presidents), Sanjay Mayukh (MLC) and Arvind Menon (ex-general secretary organisation). These leaders have been asked to help the UP state unit in poll management and coordination with workers and candidates. Mangal Pandey is also on the list of BJP star campaigners.new