BJP and Congress prepare for Hindi heartland battle

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in Rajasthan's Bhilwara district on Saturday to attend the 1111th birth anniversary celebrations of the 10th-century Gurjar folk deity Devnarayan and address a public meeting. The temple trust has invited neither Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot nor Congress leader Sachin Pilot, who hails from the Gurjar community.

It will be the PM's second visit to Rajasthan in as many months and an outreach to the Gurjar community amid an increasing Gehlot versus Pilot war of words in the Congress. In November, Modi was in Rajasthan's Mangarh Dham, the site of the massacre of Bhil tribals by the British a century back.

Not only Rajasthan, but the PM is also set to visit Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh more frequently. The three Hindi heartland states, two of which Congress currently rules, are scheduled for polls in November. As a follow-up to its national executive meeting in mid-January in the national capital, the BJP's state units in the three states concluded their state executive meetings this week. They will now take up district and block-level sessions.

Party leadership asked state executive members to work towards bringing the party to power in the three states by contesting the November elections in Modi's name and not that of any regional satraps. In the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-ruled Madhya Pradesh, former BJP minister Anup Mishra demanded that the party replicate the Gujarat template by replacing the incumbent party leadership. BJP's Bhind Lok Sabha MP Sandhya Rai briefed the media about the party's outreach to Dalit and tribal women, but scurried out when asked how were Dalit and tribal women were expected to buy the expensive cooking gas cylinders under the Ujjwala scheme.

The Congress plans to target the BJP government's failure to rein in food inflation and the steep price of cooking gas during its 'haath se haath jodo' padayatra in the first week of February in Madhya Pradesh. It launched the Chhattisgarh leg on Thursday, where 307 Congress committees will walk 10 km daily. In Rajasthan, Gehlot announced an ambitious "mission 156" as the party's target of winning 156 of 200 seats in the state assembly. No party has returned to power in the state since 1993. In Bhopal, BJP leader P Muralidhar Rao also set his party the ambitious target of winning 200 of 230 seats.