BJP mulls game plan for 123 tough seats

Leaders assigned to booths in non-BJP states

 BJP president Amit Shah has asked party leaders to form a panel of candidates for the 123 “difficult” Lok Sabha seats in the next two months so that they get ample time to prepare for the polls in these constituencies in 2019.

Shah has conceived a secret ‘Mission 350’ election strategy and has assigned the task to 25 party leaders, including 16 Union and state ministers, to curate the 123 Lok Sabha seats BJP has never won for raising an organisational team right from the booth level.

The Union ministers roped in for the “mission” are Ravi Shankar Prasad, Ananth Kumar, Piyush Goyal, Dharmendra Pradhan, Prakash Javadekar, J P Nadda, Nirmala Sitharaman, Narendra Singh Tomar, Manoj Sinha, Arjun Meghawal and R K Singh.

While those taken from the states include Vinod Tawade from Maharastra, Swatantradev Singh from UP, Mangal Pandey from Bihar, Narottam Mishra from MP and Hemant Biswa from Assam.

Each of them have got four to seven constituencies spread over the states ruled by non-BJP parties such as West Bengal (20), Odisha (13), Karnataka (8), Tamil Nadu (9), Andhra Pradesh (15), Telangana (13), Punjab (5) and Kerala (12).

BJP media cell in-charge Anil Baluni will look after Punjab.

The BJP has also picked up seats in the states where the BJP is ruling, such as Madhya Pradesh, Maharastra, Chattisgarh and Assam, to take on Opposition leaders, especially from the Congress. 

In the list of difficult constituencies, Rae Barelli and Amethi, represented by Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi respectively, surprisingly do not figure. The party will take up the discussion on the strategy at its extended national executive meeting taking place in Delhi on Monday.

Shah has also told leaders to work on the seats that Congress has been winning and get their workers to join the BJP.

As part of its rural reach out, the NDA has worked out a strategy to tap the ‘defeated’ sarpanchs in 2.5 lakh gram panchayats spread across the country so that it would be easier to build a team in villages ahead of next Lok Sabha polls.

On the eve of the conclave, Shah took a meeting of office-bearers, state chiefs and key organisational leaders to finalise agenda items, including resolutions, that the national executive will deliberate on in the session.