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BJP sets up panel to bolster party in 74,000 booths
The four senior BJP functionaries who have been assigned to carry out the task are national general secretary CT Ravi, national vice-presidents Baijayant Panda and Dilip Ghosh, and party’s SC Morcha chief Lal Singh Arya, a senior party leader said.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has set up a four-member task force to undertake an exercise to strengthen the party’s presence across nearly 74,000 booths where it feels it has scope to improve its tally, people familiar with the development said.
The four senior BJP functionaries who have been assigned to carry out the task are national general secretary CT Ravi, national vice-presidents Baijayant Panda and Dilip Ghosh, and party’s SC Morcha chief Lal Singh Arya, a senior party leader said.
A meeting of the committee, which was set up 14 days ago, was held in the BJP headquarters on Monday.
The four-member task force will be chaired by Panda. “Over the next three months, they will travel and cover every assembly seat and Lok Sabha seat that the BJP currently holds, the total number is 2,300. In collaboration with the state and district functionaries, they will also cover those 100 Lok Sabha seats where the BJP did not win, in order to improve the party’s performance,” said a functionary.
According to a second functionary, these booths have been identified on the basis of the outcome of the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. “A large number of these booths are in the southern states,” said the second functionary aware of the details.
For 2024, the party high command has set a target of winning more seats than the 303 Lok Sabha seats it won in 2019. “This exercise is being carried out with an eye on the next general elections,” said the second functionary.
The BJP has set its sights on expansion in the southern states. While it claims to be in the pole position in Karnataka, where it is in power; the party sees itself as a serious contender in Telangana. In recent months, the party has upped the ante against chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao-led Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government in the state and hopes to emerge as an alternative to the ruling party.
“Even in Kerala, where the demography is not in favour of the BJP and where our workers have been routinely attacked, we are the only party that works on the ground. In the last two months, three BJP workers were killed in Kerala,” the second functionary quoted above said.
The committee will submit a draft on the proposals to improve the party’s position in these booths, some of which have a higher percentage of minority votes.
A third functionary said the party follows the practice of identifying and focusing on weak booths, where the party bags less than 50% of the total votes polled in every state. The practice is also followed for the Lok Sabha elections.
“In every poll-bound state, the preparation includes identification of those booths where we first undertake a membership drive; then we depute panna pramukhs to make contact with the voters and identify the issues that either weaken the party or can be used to prop up the party. This was followed most recently in Uttar Pradesh, Goa and Uttarakhand,” the third functionary added.
The process typically selects seats where the party’s candidates end up third or where the margins of loss are wider.
“The idea to strengthen the booths was mooted during the presidency of Amit Shah. Since then, the party has followed the process of both online and offline contact programmes to reach out to beneficiaries of government schemes to elicit their support,” the third functionary said.
