A small pool of candidates is already in place in the majority of these seats.
At least 125 sitting BJP MPs will be denied tickets to contest the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, and new faces, even those who are not seen as “senior” enough, will be fielded in place of them. This party strategy, if implemented, will be in line with what the BJP leadership has been doing in the states—giving tickets and opportunities to “fresh” faces who may not necessarily be on the radar of the media and are not seen as a strong enough leader.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had denied tickets to 99 sitting MPs and went on to win 303 seats, up from the 269 seats that it had its MPs on when the polls were held. In 2014 it had won 282 seats, but the tally was reduced to 269 in wake of the deaths of sitting MPs and losses in subsequent byelections.
In 2019, it had carried out a significant course correction by dropping a large number of MPs in all the central, Hindi belt states and in states attached to them.
In Madhya Pradesh, it had dropped 12 MPs, eight in Maharashtra, 13 in Gujarat, nine in Chhattisgarh, eight in Bihar (three were dropped while 5 seats went to Janata Dal United), six in Rajasthan, 23 in Uttar Pradesh. These seven seats saw 79 new BJP faces.
As of today, the BJP has 290 MPs in the Lok Sabha.
Party sources aware of the deliberations told this newspaper that a majority of the MPs whose tickets will be denied have been indicated about the same, while on some seats the decision will be taken by January end after receiving another round of feedback from various quarters.
While the exercise to finalise the new candidates in most of these seats is still a “work in progress”, but a small pool of candidates is already in place in the majority of these seats from where the new candidates for the respective seats will be picked. The BJP will give a few seats to non-party workers. The candidates in such seats will be picked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi based on his years of assessment and political experience.
Those who will be asked to contest include Rajya Sabha members who are a part of the Cabinet now, as the party wants to utilise the political capital that they have gained by discharging their duties as Union Ministers.
One of the important criteria for selecting the new candidates, as has been the case for years now, will be to pick those individuals who can augment the attraction of Prime Minister Narendra Modi by bringing his own achievements and popularity to the equation.
And it is because of this benchmark that the BJP intends to drop more than 100 MPs, who have become a burden due to their unpopularity and inaccessibility. Those in the list include, sources said, “big” leaders as they have failed to perform their role as people’s representatives.
In 2019, amongst the “tall and big leaders” who were dropped included Kirti Azad, Shatrughan Sinha, Ramesh Bais, Vishnu Deo Sai, Abhishek Singh (son of Raman Singh), Paresh Rawal, L.K. Advani, Shanta Kumar, Sumitra Mahajan, Anoop Mishra, Sushma Swaraj, Kirit Somaiya, Bandaru Dattareya, Kalraj Mishra, Uma Bharti, Murli Manohar Joshi, Satya Pal Singh, B.C. Khanduri and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari.
Party leaders told The Sunday Guardian that they were very confident of crossing the 303-seats mark that they had reached in the 2019, in this election too barring any major “mishap”.
This assessment was, according to these leaders, based not just the Lotus symbol’s performance in the recently held Assembly elections, but the feedback that it has been continuously receiving from multiple sources that pro-incumbency was very strong across the country.
According to them, the people centric policies executed by the Prime Minister in his two terms—2014 and 2019—have started to show results, and this is adding to the pro-incumbency undercurrent for the party. The impact of the many reforms in banking, housing, roads, share market that normal voters deal with daily and were conceptualised in the last 10 years, has started becoming visible in the last couple of years.
The political pitch of “Modi ki Guarantee”, the BJP leaders said, was introduced only after the team was convinced that it would not appear a hollow slogan but a statement backed by work on the ground.
BJP leaders say that the Central government’s policies, that are being devised and executed under the close supervision of the Prime Minister, have made a positive impact on crores of lives and eased the way of living across multiple prisms, be it telecom, banking, travelling, housing or medical necessities and hence people no longer attach the benefits of the schemes to their local MPs, but associate it more strongly with the BJP symbol.
It is keeping this in mind that the BJP is not going to focus on the stature of the individual while denying him or her the ticket.