CHANDIGARH: With the Punjab Assembly elections less than five months away, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is all set to reach out to the masses across the state, as the saffron party is starting 12-day statewide anti-drug yatras across all 117 Assembly constituencies from September 18 to 30.
The yatras will be flagged off by its national president Nitin Nabin, while top leaders, including Home Minister Amit Shah and other Cabinet ministers, will take part in them.
The BJP has sought to make drugs, law and order and governance key issues in its preparations for the Assembly polls.
The yatra will start simultaneously from four locations in different parts of the state on September 18. One leg will be flagged off from Talwandi Sabo, at Takht Damdama Sahib, one of the five takhts of the Sikhs in the Malwa region of the state. The other will begin from Fatehgarh Sahib, which is associated with the martyrdom of the younger Sahibzadas of Guru Gobind Singh. Thus, these two locations are related to Sikhism.
The third yatra will start from the Veer Bhoomi Memorial in Fazilka, which is also in the Malwa region of the state. The site, widely recognised as the Asafwala War Memorial or Shaheedon Ki Samadhi, is a sacred historical site dedicated to the fierce hand-to-hand combat between India and Pakistan and the Indian soldiers who sacrificed their lives defending the strategic border town of Fazilka during the 1971 Indo-Pak War.
The fourth will start from the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Memorial at Lakhanpur near Pathankot on the Punjab-Jammu and Kashmir border. Mukherjee was the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and was arrested there in 1953 while attempting to enter J&K without a permit.
Finally, on September 30, the yatra will culminate at a temple in Jalandhar, which falls in the Doaba region of the state.
A senior party leader, on condition of anonymity, said the four starting points had been chosen carefully to weave together religious sentiment, military valour and the party’s ideological legacy.
“The name of the yatra will be finalised at the party’s core committee meeting, which is scheduled to be held on September 13,” he said.
Sources said the final programme of the yatra was still being worked out. The BJP district units are holding a series of meetings with state party president Kewal Dhillon and state organisation secretary Manthri Srinivasulu to finalise the routes, local arrangements and the schedule of party leaders at various spots.
The senior BJP leaders from the Centre are to lead the yatras at different locations across the state. Through this campaign, the party plans to take the issue of drugs directly to voters and make the drug menace a central electoral issue while also expanding its organisational presence across the state.
The campaign is set to be one of the party’s major political programmes ahead of the Assembly elections due early next year.
The campaign comes months after Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while addressing the BJP’s “Badlav Rally” in Moga on March 14, said that only a BJP government could completely rid Punjab of the drug menace.
Last month, during the visit of party’s national general secretary (organisation) BL Santosh, who had come to get feedback on the party’s organisational activities and local political equations, he also made this announcement that the yatras will be taken out soon.
The exercise is being seen as an early marker of the saffron party’s resolve to contest all 117 Assembly seats on its own. State unit leaders have reiterated that there will be no alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) for the polls.
Party workers have been told to build a strong team and ensure that the BJP’s message, ideology and achievements reach every household.
