Amit Shah identified 150 seats which the party lost in 2014 in states such as West Bengal, Odisha, Karnataka and in the Northeast.
BJP chief Amit Shah on Thursday conducted a three-hour session — packed with powerpoint presentations — with top leaders, including a clutch of Union Ministers, and laid out a roadmap to win 360-plus seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The gruelling exercise at the party headquarters here came on a day when a total of 17 Opposition parties came together to target the Centre, the latest in a string of attempts to stop the BJP juggernaut that rolled out in 2014.
The BJP chief identified 150 seats which the party lost in 2014 in states such as West Bengal, Odisha, Karnataka and in the Northeast.
Shah briefed Union Ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad, JP Nadda and Nirmala Sitharaman, besides others, on how to dominate the elections — still 20 months away — and increase the party’s tally from the present 281 MPs to more than 360.
Shah has been inter-spacing his tight schedule with a Vistarak Yojna — a well-crafted reach-out programme to expand the BJP’s base and win new states — by visiting areas, where the party still lacks penetration, and deputing loyal workers to polling booths there.
His exercise on Thursday also coincided with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress sweeping all seven civic bodies for which elections were held in the state on Sunday. But the BJP emerged as its main challenger at the expense of the Congress and the Left, indicating a paradigm shift in the state’s politics.
Shah has toured West Bengal and other states such Gujarat and Karnataka exhaustively over the last few months to gauge how best to position the BJP in the upcoming state elections. “He first shared his insights from his trips so far,” said a leader present at the meeting.
At the brain-storming session, the results of surveys on the BJP’s performance and voter perception in West Bengal, Kerala, Karnataka and Odisha were debated.
The session also included a presentation on how to fight anti-incumbency in states such as Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat where the BJP has been in power for three terms.
After 30 years, a single party crossed the halfway mark when the BJP won 282 seats in the 2014 elections. It bagged 10 more than the required number for a majority in the 543-member House.
Shah was the party in-charge of Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP won an unprecedented 71 out of 80 seats in the last general polls.
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