BHUBANESWAR: After losing heavily in the panchayat and civic body elections, the BJP has decided to go for soul-searching at the Assembly constituency-level to find out what went wrong for the party that failed to win the confidence of the people.
The party has assigned a member of the State executive to each Assembly segment to analyse the results of the two elections with the help of the block and district functionaries and submit the findings to the State BJP president Samir Mohanty. “Usually such exercises were made at the State headquarters of the party. We thought it would be prudent to go for a deeper analysis by involving a wider section of the party including the candidates who fought the elections,” said Mohanty.
After studying the reports from 147 Assembly constituencies, the party will discuss the shortcomings at the core committee meeting and decide the course of action to rectify the mistakes before the next general elections scheduled in 2024, he added.
A team of State BJP functionaries led by Mohanty was in Delhi for nearly a week and apprised the outcome of the poll results to party’s national president JP Nadda, Union Ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and Ashwini Vaishnaw.
Since the party at national-level has chalked out an elaborate programme from April 7 to 20 which will be observed as Social Justice Fortnight, Mohanty said the post-poll introspection will start from April 6, BJP’s foundation day. This will go side by side with the public connect programmes starting from pond sanitation exercise to visiting the ‘lavarthis’ (beneficiaries) of all the welfare programmes of the Narendra Modi government.
The programmes devised by the party aims to give an opportunity to the BJP workers to connect with the people by offering voluntary labour for community purpose for 15 days during Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav celebration.
After the Social Justice Fortnight, the party will start its organisational works from booth-level keeping in mind the ‘120 Mission’ set by former BJP president and current Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
“We will restart the Mo Booth Sabuthu Mazbhut (My booth is the strongest) programme in an earnest manner to strengthen the party organisation at the grassroots level,” he said.
Admitting that the party has marginally lost its popular votes by 1.3 per cent from 32 per cent in 2017 panchayat elections to 30.7 per cent in 2022 polls, Mohanty said, “ We will try to win the confidence of the voters by rectifying out mistakes.” He, however, attributed the marginal loss to the rapid fall of the Congress and shifting of its votes to the ruling BJD.