BJP gets ready to take on more regional satraps

After Maharashtra and Haryana, the BJP is now getting its blueprints ready to take on regional parties in around half a dozen other states.

Once the next round of state elections — Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand — is over, the party will set its eyes on Bihar and West Bengal.

BJP president Amit Shah will be focusing on Bihar which is headed for elections next year and West Bengal where polls are due in 2016, party sources said. Shah is scheduled to hold a rally in Kolkata on November 30.

While castigating the performance of ruling state parties such as Nitish Kumar's JD-U in Bihar, Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress in West Bengal or Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party in UP, the BJP is likely to adopt a common tactical line of projecting prime minister Narendra Modi and flaunting the BJP's governance model, replicating its strategy in Maharashtra and Haryana.

Till before the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP was reaching out to regional players in a bid to stitch up electoral tie-ups. Post-poll, a confident BJP has reversed its strategy, preferring to go it alone condensing the space of the state parties.

"The Left is decimated in West Bengal. There is no Congress. The fight is between Trinamool Congress and BJP," said Siddharth Nath Singh, the party's national secretary in-charge of West Bengal. The BJP has undertaken an aggressive membership drive, is conducting a door-to-door campaign and is targeting the youth. Sources said the BJP had already drafted a blueprint for 2016 when elections are scheduled in the state, where it has won an assembly seat for the first time in the Basirhat Dakshin by-poll last month making the Saradha scam and the Bangladeshi infiltrators its key planks.

In Bihar, the BJP is trying to reach out to every strata of society and galvanising the party at the panchayat level, senior party leader Sushil Modi said. He claimed that the party was confident of facing the challenge from secular forces coming together against the BJP while admitting that no election was a cake walk for any party. "This alliance between RJD and JD (U) is absolutely immoral and the people of Bihar understand that. BJP-JD(U) collaborated to fight the mis-governance of the Lalu regime and got a mandate. By joining hands with a person like Lalu, Nitish Kumar has lost his credibility as he has essentially gone against people's mandate.

This situation will be in our favour as a three-corner fight would have hurt us," Sushil Modi told dna. Shah recently appointed Rajya Sabha MP from Rajasthan Bhupendra Yadav as the state in-charge in Bihar, where the Yadavs constitute an influential chunk of the electorate.

Political commentator Urmilesh, however, maintains that Bihar will be the litmus test for BJP. "The saffron-cum development model of Narendra Modi will be tested in Bihar. By then people would have seen the BJP in the Centre for more than one year. And the secular forces which were divided during the Lok Sabha polls would have ample time to consolidate themselves by the time of Bihar assembly elections next year," he said.

The BJP is also hoping to conquer Jharkhand, banking on the incumbent disadvantage of the JMM-RJD-Congress. A senior state BJP leader, who did not wish to be named, told dna, "The leadership's strategy is very clear – seek votes in the name of the prime minister. While helping in implementing the PM's pet projects such as the Jan Dhan Yojana, we are also giving a message to beneficiaries," he said. Shah has already given a call for a sweeping majority of over 80 seats in the 90-member assembly.

Senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha has been holding fort in Jharkhand for almost six months.

Like in other states going to polls, BJP's resurrection in Uttar Pradesh, which goes to polls in 2018, would be at the cost of SP and BSP. The BSP, which got just 2.2 per cent votes in Maharashtra and 6.73 per cent in Haryana, already faces the prospect of losing its national party status. The other states where the BJP's strategy is likely to encroach the share of regional parties are Odisha, Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab, where it is in alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal.

"There is an appeal for an Indian identity. People want to get identified with a national party. Regional politics has failed to accommodate demographic changes in the country," said R Balashankar, convenor of the party's intellectual cell.