Ahead of 2024, BJP plans outreach to panchayat leaders as part of Lok Sabha Pravas programme

Intensifying its efforts ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party has chalked out an outreach plan, where meetings will be held with all the elected panchayat leaders of the country. The decision was taken at a key meeting of the party where President JP Nadda was reviewing the work put into the Lok Sabha Pravas programme.

Meetings with panchayat leaders will be held in zones, and for this purpose, the party will form four zones, each a cluster of 10-12 states, leaders involved in the process told DH. The exercise is to be finished by October this year. A training workshop will also be held in the coming days to facilitate the programme.

“The elected panchayat leaders will be made aware of the achievements of the Modi government in the last nine years, especially of the particular schemes that have benefitted people in their regions,” the leader said.

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A roadmap for the second phase of the Lok Sabha Pravas programme, a senior leader present at the meeting said, is to “reach out to the unreached”. “After 9 years of Modi government's programmes, we discussed ways of reaching out to voters and regions where the BJP has not had any reception whatsoever,” the leader said.

Present at the meeting, apart from Nadda, were general secretaries Vinod Tawde and Sunil Bansal, as well as MP Harish Dwivedi and national spokesperson Sambit Patra.

The Lok Sabha Pravas programme was devised by the party to increase its footprint in 144 seats that it had lost in 2019. These were the seats where the party came in second and feels it has a chance in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. After some internal feedback, these seats were later increased to 160. Union ministers and prominent Parliamentarians were given targets and were asked to make a specific number of visits to these constituencies and stay overnight in certain cases.

By December last year, the party had also appointed 1000 ‘vistaraks’ who were to work in these seats. Training sessions were held for the vistaraks in Hyderabad and Patna, and by the end of 2023, the team of vistaraks will be increased to 3000, said a key leader attending Wednesday’s meeting.