BHUBANESWAR: Unable to breach the forte of a powerful BJD despite a strong Modi wave across the country, the BJP has decided to redouble its efforts to further strengthen its grassroots organisations in Odisha.
This will done with an aim to achieve ‘Mission 120’ in 2024. While the party is still analysing factors responsible for its poor performance in the Assembly election despite improving its tally in Assembly and Lok Sabha, there is near unanimity among leaders who met here on Sunday and dissected the poll results that the BJP failed to match the organisational strength of the BJD.
“As we were swayed away with Modi wave we failed to gauge the mood of voters. Overconfidence of BJP winning this election killed the spirit of the party workers whereas BJD workers worked sincerely till the voting was over,” said a party functionary who was present at the meeting.
While the common complaint was that BJD used money power and government machinery to its advantage, some district presidents of the party owned up the failure saying that might be one of the reasons but do not justify poor performance of the party.
They said the BJD workers proved success by delivering the message of all welfare programmes of the Naveen Patnaik Government to the people while the BJP could not reach them with the achievements of Narendra Modi Government at the Centre.
Top leaders of the party, including Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, State BJP president Basanta Panda and party’s Odisha in-charge Arun Singh had an interactive session with district presidents and pravaris (party in-charge for district units) here on Sunday to find out what went wrong for the party in the recent elections.
The BJP won 23 Assembly seats against 112 of the BJD and 8 Lok Sabha seats out of 21. The party had 10 members in the Assembly and only one in the Lok Sabha.
It was decided at the meeting that district units of the party will chalk out programmes to keep the cadres engaged and ensure that the Central government programmes are reaching to intended beneficiaries.
The party will meet in July to work out a detailed programme that includes membership drive to give a further boost to the organisation at the booth level.
Though membership enrolment is done every six years and the next drive is scheduled in 2021, there is no restriction in adding new members to the party, said party spokesperson Golak Mohapatra.