For 2019, Amit Shah eyes new territories
The Narendra Modi government may have just finished celebrating its second anniversary, but BJP chief Amit Shah has already drawn up plans for a winning strategy for the 2019 general election, identifying 113 seats where the party can hope to win for the first time.
At a meeting of the party’s State-level core committee members in August, Mr. Shah separately met leaders handling six States (both at the State and Central level) — Kerala, West Bengal, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Tamil Nadu — and the North Eastern Development Alliance convener, Himanta Biswa Sarma, for this purpose.
“A survey was presented at the meeting that went into these 113 identified constituencies one by one. These are seats where the party did better than expected in the 2014 polls and could be new catchment areas,” said a senior office-bearer who attended the meeting.
The BJP’s 2014 tally saw it showing a 100 per cent strike rate in Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan, and a very high number of seats in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
Sources said that the survey identified 22 seats each in West Bengal and the northeast and 15 in Andhra Pradesh.
Preliminary plan
Mr. Shah had commissioned the survey, and after having shared it with senior leaders dealing with these States, asked for a “preliminary plan” for winning by October 15. “State core committees will meet every fortnight and share the minutes of these meetings with the national president of the party,” a senior leader said.
The party president has been speaking of expanding the base in non-traditional areas of influence for the BJP, what he terms the “Coromandel coast”, the north-eastern States and Kerala. With its best performance yet in the 2014 elections, the party will need to capture such ground to win in 2019.
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