BJP eyes 120 LS seats it never won

The BJP has started early preparations for the 2019 polls. Party president Amit Shah on Thursday got into a huddle with top leaders to appoint managers to curate 120 Lok Sabha seats it never won.

Shah, said BJP sources, met about a dozen Union and Uttar Pradesh ministers and 10 general secretaries at the party’s Ashoka Road headquarters, to identify the leaders who can work as ‘palaks’ (managers) in at least six Lok Sabha seats each, which it had always lost.

Among the Union ministers who attended the meeting and are likely to be assigned the task of palaks are Ravi Shankar Prasad, J P Nadda, Dharmendra Pradhan, Piyush Goyal, Narendra Singh Tomar, Prakash Javadekar and Nirmala Sitharaman. Party general secretaries Ram Lal, Ram Madhav, Arun Singh, Anil Jain, Murlidhar Rao, Kailash Vijayvargiya, V Satish, Shiv Prakash, Saudan Singh and B L Santosh, too, are likely to be made palaks.

Shah is keen on creating a crack team to work on the ground in these parliamentary segments. The Union ministers will chip in heavily since the party does not have enough leaders to galvanise workers and voters to convert defeat into victory in these segments, explained the BJP sources aware of the planning.

Other than the palaks, the second rung of the team will have leaders who will be assigned constituencies other than their native ones.

The party has been doing the spade work at the booth level in weaker areas such as West Bengal, Kerala, Odisha and in the Northeast, except for Assam — where it had won comfortably — to compensate for the states where the BJP had peaked in the 2014 elections. Those states are Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh.