New Delhi: With the Hindi heartland emerging as a tricky terrain, BJP spin doctors have decided to focus in eastern and southern India. The party is planning at least 300 rallies in West Bengal and nearly the same number in southern states as a build-up to the Lok Sabha elections in around May.
While Bengal has 42 Lok Sabha seats, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala have 130 Lok Sabha seats.
“If we can manage a lion’s share of Lok Sabha seats from Bengal and southern states, we will able to cross the 250 mark,” a senior BJP leader said on the eve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Tamil Nadu on Sunday.
Bengal is all set for a major campaign blitz involving top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah, in the next three months. The Prime Minister is expected to hold two rallies in West Bengal during the first week of February.
Following the entry of Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra into politics and the SP-BSP coalition consolidating rapidly, BJP strategists feel that the route to Delhi through Uttar Pradesh could be a “tricky one”. After the recent Assembly poll setbacks in Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the BJP is not confident of retaining the 71 Lok Sabha seats it won in Uttar Pradesh 2014.
Ahead of Prime Minister’s Tamil Nadu on Sunday, BJP national general secretary P. Muralidhar Rao has gone on record saying that the Prime Minister’s visit “will give a major boost to BJP’s growth plan in Tamil Nadu and South India”.
Speaking to the media, Mr Rao said that the Prime Minister would present a report card for the developmental projects. “He will explain to the people what his government has done for the state and the country,” he said. Tamil Nadu has 39 Lok Sabha seats.
In Karnataka which has 28 Lok Sabha seats, the BJP is allegedly still trying to rock the state government. On Saturday, chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy alleged that the BJP “was still persisting with its ‘Operation Kamal’ to topple the JD(S)-Congress government.”
The chief minister alleged, “Operation Kamal is still on. The BJP offered one of our MLAs huge amount of money.”
Former state chief and BJP leader B.S. Yeddyurappa refuted the charges ad claimed that the Congress-JD(S) combine has “failed to keep its flock together”.
In Kerala with 21 Lok Sabha berths, the BJP is working to highlight the Sabarimala issue to ensure that the Hindutva issue pays rich electoral dividend like Ayodhya temple did at the national level in the 1990s.
Despite RSS’ heavy presence in the state, the BJP has never been able to make political inroads. The vote banks of the Nairs, Ezhava, dalits are split between the UDF and the LDF. Also the 55 per cent of Hindu vote bank has never tilted towards the BJP.
Keeping the Sabarimala pot stirring, the BJP is now trying to “exploit the religious sentiments of the majority community”, a senior party functionary said.
In Andhra Pradesh with 25 Lok Sabha seats, the BJP is finding itself in a tight corner. A party functionary from the state felt that it “might be difficult to even retain the two Lok Sabh seats from the state”.
In Telengana with 17 seats, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) is expected to bag the maximum number of Lok Sabha berths.
The BJP has planned over 300 rallies in West Bengal over the next two months.
