UP gives BJP a success formula
NEW DELHI: BJP’s Uttar Pradesh chief Keshav Prasad Maurya was a centre of attraction at the party’s national executive in Bhubaneswar recently. Obviously, the illustrious show of the party in his home state lent him a bit of stardom and his presentation on how the state unit went about achieving it was heard with rapt attention. The delegates were looking for takeaways from the proceedings.
The electoral success of UP, incidentally, has emerged as a template for the BJP to be adopted in other states where the party is keen to expand its base. Party chief Amit Shah is learnt to have asked Maurya to document the strategies deployed in UP, which could be shared with party units in other states.
The party had undertaken a house-to-house campaign, with an elaborate network of polling booth committees, which led to effective micro-management of the campaign.
“The UP BJP chief had made a detailed presentation on the state Assembly elections and the strategies employed. Since the BJP made exponential growth in the state in a very short span of time from just 47 MLAs in 2012 to 325 in the 2017 polls, the party is emboldened that similar growth trajectory could be attempted in states where the party is seen weak but are crucial for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections,” said a senior BJP functionary.
While the party will begin to document the success map in UP since 2013, when Shah was appointed the BJP in-charge for the state by the then chief Rajnath Singh, sources said that the saffron outfit would particularly focus on ways in which the social engineering was attempted, bringing rich dividends in turn. “The UP success proved that the BJP is not just an urban-centric party with support base among the upper castes and the trading community. The party was able to carve out a strong constituency of the Other Backward Castes (OBCs), which polarised in its favour. A similar model could come handy in other states where the UP model could be customised to suit the local demography and other factors,” added the BJP functionary.
Incidentally, the BJP, which is seeking to attempt a pole vault in Odisha, has begun replicating the UP model. “We are putting in place the executive committees at mandal levels. We are empowering them to take decisions on their own in choosing candidates for the local body polls, and identify issues which they can raise and even finalise the manner of agitation. We are also making the organization more robust by making the mandal-level committees more focussed, as the party has gone to constitute such a panel for every 60 polling booths against 120 earlier. The move will help local leaders connect more strongly with about a dozen villages under their jurisdictions,” said Arun Singh, the BJP national general secretary in-change of Odisha.
The documentation of the UP verdict would also look into the issue of leadership, as the party is of the view it has no credible faces in many states, including Odisha, Telangana, West Bengal and Tripura, where the BJP is keen to pole vault to power.