BJP launches outreach for ‘weak booths’, lost seats

Party seeks to expand footprint and increase its tally in the next Lok Sabha elections

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president J.P. Nadda on Wednesday held a series of meetings with Ministers in the Narendra Modi government, and party leaders from across the country and drew up an elaborate programme for not just Ministers to travel to various parts of the country to mark Mr. Modi’s completion of eight years as Prime Minister but also the strengthening of 74,000 electoral booths, and visits to 144 Lok Sabha seats, where the party considers itself weak or has no Member of Parliament at the moment.

While Ministers will travel to 144 Lok Sabha seats where the BJP has no MPs (each Minister will visit a “cluster of seats” decided in advance), Mr. Nadda has formed a committee, headed by BJP vice president Baijayant Panda, to accentuate booth outreach activities in the selected 74,000 booths as preparation for the 2024 general elections. This campaign will run between May 31 to June 15.

Mr. Nadda is hoping that this exercise too will result in good outcomes like the “ vistarak” programme that was launched by former party president and current Home Minister Amit Shah in 2016, for which 113 seats were identified by the party as those it had never won but where, in many cases, it stood second or secured a notable number of votes, and full-time and part-time party workers were deployed for organisational work. Out of the 113 seats for which vistaraks were utilised in 2016, the BJP won around 80 seats in the 2019 polls.  

BJP vice president Dilip Ghosh, general secretary C.T. Ravi, and the party’s Scheduled Caste Morcha head Lal Singh Arya are members of the steering committee heading the exercise. All party MPs have been asked to strengthen 100 “weak booths” in their respective constituencies and a 30-member team will be formed for the purpose, party sources said.

Similarly, party MLAs have been given the task of strengthening 10 “weak booths” in their constituencies, sources said. The BJP’s Rajya Sabha MPs have been given the responsibility of strengthening polling booths in those Lok Sabha constituencies where the party lost, sources said. The weaker booths have been identified on the basis of the results of the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections and State Assembly elections, they said.

These booths have been divided into various categories on the basis of demography, organisational strength and other aspects, they said.   

As part of this campaign, BJP leaders will have to form teams, train them, and then carry out outreach activities in the area that comes under these weaker polling booths, sources said, adding that special focus will be on beneficiaries of various government schemes. The broader idea behind this exercise is to expand the BJP’s footprint and increase its tally in the next Lok Sabha elections, they said.