NEW DELHI: As part of its national election strategy for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP is going all-out to woo women voters, particularly in the 12 states with more female voters.
Of its 423 candidates, 68 are women, accounting for nearly 16% of the contestants for the seven-phase elections, which got underway on Friday.
The party’s unique campaigns across the target states aim to strengthen the winnability of its women candidates in more than 100 seats as part of the strategy of winning 370 seats. Speaking to this newspaper, a senior party functionary pointed out that most BJP workers from the panchayats to district levels have been tasked with a ‘door to door’ campaign to polarise women and young voters.
This is in addition to intensified electioneering, rallies and other campaigns carried out by the party’s senior leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, JP Nadda, Amit Shah and 37 other star campaigners.
“The party is creating a significant core vote bank of women with an eye on the 2029 general elections”, said a senior woman BJP functionary. “In 2014, we had fielded 38 women candidates, which went up to 55 in 2019 and 68 in 2024.
This reflects our growing concerns towards making a strong inroads to the women’s vote bank. Our workers are reaching out to the women with the performances of the Modi government in the past ten years”, said another woman functionary.
Citing a recent SBI report, a well-informed source told this newspaper recently that in the light of a projection of women voters going to outnumber men voters by 2029 in the country, a well-crafted and focused strategy has been adopted to reach out to women voters across the country.
“This is aimed at creating a big core women vote bank towards the party’s political ideology and realising the vision of PM Modi’s ‘Viksit-Bharat’ by 2047. As part of this well-crafted strategy in effect from this Lok Sabha election, a sea of workers have been engaged in conducting “door to door” campaigns to reach out to women voters with the Modi Ki Guarantee mentioned in the party manifesto on women with works so far done for them in the last ten years”, remarked a senior party source.
He said that once the BJP makes inroads to women voters strongly in the 12 states, other states would also be covered through outreaches throughout the next four years ahead of 2029.
According to the SBI report, the women voters’ turnout during every election is likely to surpass 55% compared to 45% of men voters by 2047. “Our party has embarked on a mission to woo women and young voters whose numbers are continuously growing in every election, remarked a BJP functionary.
Some states, like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, are among states with a higher number of women voters than men, he added. According to official statistics, nearly 26 crore of the 55 crore voter turnout in the 2014 LS elections were women, registering around 5.5 per cent higher than the average voter turnout reported between 1962 and 2009.
In 2019, the voter turnout was reported to be around 62.5 crore, and notably, out of them, 30 crore were women. In the ongoing LS elections, around 68-70 crore people are expected to exercise their votes, which includes around 32-33 crore women.