Mission 402: Amit Shah chalks out roadmap for 2019
Shah himself is on a 95-day tour across the country with special emphasis on the fives states of West Bengal, Odisha, Gujarat, Telangana and Lakshdweep. Shah will be spending at least three days in each of these states.
Setting a target to win 402 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP President Amit Shah has already laid out an extensive programme for party cadres that includes him and goes down to the lowest rung in the hierarchy, the booth-level cadre.
Shah himself is on a 95-day tour across the country with special emphasis on the fives states of West Bengal, Odisha, Gujarat, Telangana and Lakshdweep. Shah will be spending at least three days in each of these states.
Simultaneously, he will undertake a 15-day Deendayal Vistarak Yatra aimed purely at expanding the party's ideological base. His recent Naxalbari visit in West Bengal was for this very purpose. Shah will visit Jammu next, where, like in Naxalbari, he will have a separate and elaborate meeting with the state's intellectuals.
"In Bengal, I worked for the expansion of the party, having held meetings with at least 150 individuals," Shah said.
"The aim is to expand the BJP's organisational base, increasing its ideological acceptance and bring improvement in the electoral list and expand it," he added.
The party, which boasts of having 11 crore members, also plans to reach out to all of them and involve them somehow or the other in party work — be at the mandal, district, block or village level.
"At the booth level, our workers should have a list of all the members and reach out to them to ensure that they are involved in party activities," Shah said.
Helping Shah spread his ideological outreach are 3.52 lakh committed BJP workers, who will be spread across the nation, spending 15 days to one year at one place depending on the targeted area, which have been divided into three kinds. Of them, 600 party cadres will be out on the field till the final counting day of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
This would mean that one worker will be at each of the 545 constituencies, while the remaining will monitor five constituencies as coordinators.
Shah said the tour is also a stock-taking exercise to check whether all the decisions taken by the party from August 9, 2014, when it came to power, to now have been implemented or not and to see where the gaps exist.