Besides booth management, the party will focus on the 70 Assembly seats it was not able to win the last time.
New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has started preparations on a war footing in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh which will go for polls early next year. The mantra of the saffron party is going to be micro-level booth management and special focus on 70 such Assembly seats which it was not able to win the last time.
Recently, a major brainstorming session was held in which all the top BJP leaders of the state, BJP’s Uttar Pradesh election in-charge Dharmendra Pradhan, BJP’s co-in-charges of different zones and district in-charges, discussed the future strategy for the polls.
It was decided that all district in-charges will take the stock of their area and submit reports to Dharmendra Pradhan and regional in-charges so as they can understand the party position in each district.
The party had also activated its network of the RSS to prepare a database of workers who can connect with each village and showcase the achievements of the present government.
The BJP had divided the state into six regions in view of its large size and population.
The regions named are Awadh, Kanpur, Bundelkhand, Braj, Kashi, Gorakhpur,and western UP. Shobha Karandlaje has been given charge of Awadh, Annapurna Devi will handle Kanpur region, Vivek Thakur is the in-charge of Gorakhpur region, Arjun Ram Meghwal has been given charge of Braj zone and Captain Abhimanyu will handle the Western UP zone.
BJP MLA Vijay Kumar Kashyap said: “We are well-prepared for the polls. Our booth-level workers are ready; we have appointed in-charges in all the Assembly seats apart from the district in-charges and zonal in-charges. The preparation of other parties has not started. The developmental schemes of Narendra Modiji and Yogiji have penetrated the remote corners of the state; therefore, we are sure that we will win more seats than 2017.
Our feedback meetings are taking place regularly. Any loopholes on any seats had been addressed by the leadership.
In the 2017 Assembly elections, the BJP won a landslide victory by winning 312 seats in the Assembly of 403, while its smaller partners won 13 seats. The party secured roughly 40% vote share in the elections which was highest by any party in the last 35 years history of the state. The main Opposition party, the Samajwadi Party (SP), bagged 47 seats out of the 298 it contested in alliance with the Congress which won seven seats, while the BSP won 19.
Hareram Kumar Mishra, a senior lecturer and analyst under Kanpur University, said, “The BJP is focusing more on those 65 seats which it lost in 2017. The party has appointed in-charges in each of these seats and has roped in important leaders who can help the party frame a winning strategy in these seats. The rationale is that there would be anti-incumbency against party MLAs in a few seats; likewise, there would be anti-incumbency against rival party’s MLAs in the seats. The BJP is trying to exploit that so that its figure of 300 plus does not go down in the state. It is a smart strategy by the party. Moreover, the large network of RSS-affiliated organizations has given the BJP a major boost and acts as an X-factor in the polls.”
Political analysts believe that the BJP can only be defeated in the state if the Opposition parties counter the saffron surge at the booth-level, as in the previous elections, in comparison to the BJP, other parties’ micro-management was nowhere. All other parties lack a network of workers that the saffron party had in the state of UP.