Amit Shah back in Bhubaneswar in pursuit of Mission 120+
BHUBANESWAR: BJP national president Amit Shah is back in Bhubaneswar for a three-day tour to review progress on Mission 120+, his master plan to wrest power from the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in the 2019 Assembly elections.
Mission 120+ is Amit’s Shah’s strategy to bag more than 120 seats in the Odisha Assembly of 147 seats. The BJP has only 10 now. In the 2014 election, Odisha was the only state which bucked the Narendra Modi wave. It re-elected the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD government for the fourth time in a row and sent as many as 20 BJD MPs to the Lok Sabha.
The party has laid out a punishing schedule for Shah during the next three days. Notionally, he is expected to meet one lakh BJP workers during the visit as part of the booth-level contact programme that he spelt out back in July. The aim is to meet the maximum number of number of people in the 36,000 election booths in the state.
Towards Mission 120+, the party has already enrolled about 4,000 active volunteers to work full time on election-related work. Each full-timer is being assigned nine booths in a constituency and tasked with creating a winnable environment for the party.
The BJP president’s first day is filled with meetings with national office-bearers and executive committee members, national morcha office-bearers, MPs, MLAs, state-level functionaries, former MPs and MLAs, district BJP presidents and district prabharis, state BJP general secretary Bhrugu Baxipatra said.
After these meeting, there’s a discussion with intellectuals from different walks of life at a Bhubaneswar hotel in the evening.
Shah was given a rousing reception when he touched down at the Bhubaneswar airport this morning and was taken to the state guest house in a motorcycle rally.