NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party is going back to the basics after being defeated in the Assembly elections of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The BJP leadership is motivating its booth level workers and strengthening its organisational structure at the lowest level, a move that helped it immensely in the 2014 general elections and many more Assembly elections that followed.
Taking charge will be Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah, who will hold one-on-one interaction with lakhs of booth level workers in the run-up to the polls. The idea is to boost the morale of the workers who play a crucial role in identifying the voters and bringing them to the polling booth.
While Prime Minister Modi has been interacting with workers through the NaMo app, Shah will camp in various states and hold meetings with booth workers. In Delhi, Amit Shah will interact with over 13,000 BJP workers on Sunday, the aim essentially being to strengthen the basic party structure.
The move comes in the wake of the party’s defeat in the three states, where, despite a strong presence of its cadre, the BJP failed to mobilise voters in its support. A large chunk of BJP voters from the Baniya community and upper caste Hindus voted against the BJP, which led to the party’s defeat.
Modi and Shah have already told BJP MPs in a recent meeting to interact with local workers and address their grievances. Sources said booth workers, during their interaction with Shah in Delhi, will also put forward their suggestions that would be considered by the top BJP leadership.
It may be noted that appointing “booth in-charge” and “panna pramukh (page supervisor)” was Amit Shah’s idea in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. During the 2014 elections, Shah was in charge of BJP in Uttar Pradesh where the party won 73 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats. The same model was replicated in many state Assembly elections. For the first time, the BJP is also issuing bar-coded ID cards for all its booth workers to ensure that they attend the meeting with Shah at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium. The ID card issued for the function will contain all the details of the individual. The convener of programme, Dharambir Singh told The Sunday Guardian that with the barcode it will be easy to keep a check on the workers’ attendance during the meeting.
During his previous visits, Shah had instructed the states units to focus on booth management. Delhi BJP has appointed 12,000 booth presidents in the over 13,500 total polling booths in the city. A BJP leader said that booth level workers play a key role in identifying the swing voters and shifting them to the party’s fold. Apart from mass on-ground activities, such as public meetings and road shows by leaders and candidates, and media campaigns, micro-level targeting is equally important to reach out to voters.