Early Campaign, Boosting Vote Share, Ram Mandir: BJP Leaders Chalk Out Strategy Ahead of 2024 LS Polls

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders including Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Party President JP Nadda and state unit chiefs met for the second day on Saturday at the party headquarters in New Delhi ahead of the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The BJP has set its sights on winning an “unprecedented majority” in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking key organisational leaders to work towards boosting the party’s vote share by 10 per cent, sources said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah are likely to hit the campaign early for the Lok Sabha elections after January 15, before announcement of poll dates. The strategy is in line with party’s planning to hit campaign early in the recently held assembly polls, where the saffron party won Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

Addressing the BJP’s national office-bearers and state presidents on the concluding day of the two-day brainstorming meet on Saturday, Home Minister Amit Shah said that the BJP’s performance should leave the opposition “stunned”, the sources said.

“We have to reach every home with our ideology and historic works of BJP governments and make Modi ji prime minister again in 2024 with an unprecedented majority,” Shah later posted on X about his address at the meet.

With the opposition INDIA bloc planning to put up a one-on-one fight against the BJP, Modi called for raising the BJP’s vote share by 10 per cent from its show in the 2019 polls when the ruling party had fetched over 37 per cent of votes, the highest by a party since the 1989 general elections, while the National Democratic Alliance led by it had bagged around 45 per cent votes. The party has set the target to achieve 50 percent vote share in the next Lok Sabha polls.

Since coming to power at the Centre in 2014, the BJP has continuously striven to raise its vote share to 50 per cent in state assembly polls and succeeded in this feat in many elections. Shah said that the BJP’s massive win in the recent assembly polls under Modi’s charismatic leadership shows that the trust of every group and people of every region is only in the prime minister.

Modi, the sources said, also asked party leaders to reach out to first-time voters and advised them to focus on spreading the word about the government’s positive works instead of joining issues with opposition parties in their “negative” campaign.

The consecration ceremony at the Ram temple was one of the highlights of the two-day deliberations as the party is confident it will be a major issue in its favour in the polls.

Opposition parties created many obstacles in resolving the issue, which was mired in legal disputes for decades, and people should be told about it, senior party leaders noted during the meeting. Shah, like Modi a day before, underlined the primacy of organisation in elections and said it should score such an “overwhelming” win that the opposition thinks many times before challenging it, sources said.

The prime minister emphasised the need to reach out to women, youth, farmers and the poor – whom he has often described as the four biggest “castes”. He asked party leaders to connect a maximum number of these people with the ongoing ‘Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra’, which aims at saturation of his government’s flagship welfare schemes.

The sources said the party’s top brass did not set any specific seat target but emphasised on ensuring a win which should be bigger than its 2019 performance when the BJP had bagged 303 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats. They accused the opposition of resorting to lies and spreading fake narratives but expressed confidence that people would reward Modi with a third straight term at the Centre.

Top party leaders, in their speeches, asked BJP functionaries to strengthen its booth committees everywhere to ensure that its local cadres reach more and more people. The BJP’s big win in the recent assembly polls came up for praise in the meeting, with the party unit presidents of the three Hindi heartland states of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh speaking on the victories.

Modi’s leadership, the appeal of his government’s welfare schemes and the strength of its organisational machinery were cited as big reasons for the win. Different ‘morchas’ of the party spoke about their upcoming programmes in the run-up to the general elections.

(With inputs from PTI)