Express News Service
LUCKNOW: With an intent to accomplish ‘Mission 75’ in 2024 General elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has drawn a strategy to entrust its UP MPs – both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha– with the responsibility of strengthening 100 booths each.
As per the party sources, each MP has been directed to reach out to the beneficiaries of the central and state welfare schemes in their respective constituencies. They would have to be in constant touch and dialogue with the beneficiaries.
Moreover, a campaign would be launched to extend the benefit of the schemes to those families which remained deprived of it.
The ‘Vijay Mantra’ was imparted to party MPs at a workshop in Lucknow on late Friday night.
The workshop was presided over by BJP state chief and state Jal Shakti minister Swatantra Dev Singh and the main speaker on the occasion was Baijayant Panda, the party’s vice-president and in-charge of BJP’s booth strengthening campaign. Panda claimed that the party had registered victory on 1.25 lakh of total of 1.63 lakh booths in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in UP.
As per the sources, the party has divided the booths into three categories—A, B and C – as per the results of 2019. While addressing the MPs, Panda said that each parliamentary constituency had an average of 4-5 Assembly segments so each MP would focus on 25 weak booths of each of the assembly segments falling in his/her constituency by staying there.
In the first phase of the booths fortifying campaign, which is set to take off from July 18, each MP would be expected to visit and stay at 100 weak booths to hold dialogue with the electorate in order to find out the prevailing issues and ensure their redressal, said the sources.
The MPs were also asked to concentrate on those 16 of the 80 parliamentary seats which the BJP and its allies had lost in 2019. BJP and allies had won 64 of the 80 seats. The SP and BSP were tied in a grand alliance and had won five and 10 seats respectively. The Congress could win just Rea Bareli.
The sources claimed that the BJP has been chalking out a different strategy to win the seats held by the BSP and also the constituencies won by the SP.
“After winning Amethi in 2019, we will now try to wrest Rea Bareli from Congress,” said Dr Chandra Mohan, a senior BJP leader.
However, some of the party MPs including Varun Gandhi, MP from Pilibhit and his mother Maneka Gandhi, MP from Sultanpur, were conspicuous by their absence in the Friday workshop.
Some more MPs, including Smriti Z Irani, Sanjeev Balyan, Pankaj Chaudhury, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh and Vijay Sonkar, could not attend the workshop.
Meanwhile, the participation of Sanghmitra Maurya, daughter of Swami Prasad Muarya, who had left the BJP ahead of 2022 assembly elections, was the talk of the town.