The BJP has dropped as many as 100 or nearly a third of its present Lok Sabha MPs from the polls. There are multiple messages behind this strategy.
One, it means each BJP candidate in the upcoming elections gets at least a month to campaign in his or her constituency. This is vital in a fight where the BJP is looking to up its strike rate of winning seats from 70 per cent in 2019 to 83 per cent in 2024 to achieve Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious aim of 370 seats for the party.
Two, dropping as many as 100 MPs means the BJP has been ruthless in casting aside its incumbent parliamentarians who the party thinks can’t win again. This includes some big names and union ministers like General VK Singh from Ghaziabad, Ashwini Choubey from Buxar, and Meenakshi Lekhi from New Delhi. The BJP has also dropped controversial leaders like Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, Ramesh Bidhuri, and Pravesh Verma.
The effort is to cut anti-incumbency, though the party maintains that the factor is at work against the dropped candidates while the Prime Minister’s appeal remains strong. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his first message to the cadre at the national convention had made it clear — that BJP’s candidate on each seat is the Lotus,” a senior BJP leader told News18.
Third, the party has carefully negotiated tie-ups aiming towards 370 seats for itself and 400-plus for the National Democratic Alliance. Like the alliance with the Telugu Desam Party and Pawan Kalyan in Andhra Pradesh which has brightened the BJP’s chances in six seats it will contest in the state after drawing a blank the last time.
The alliance with the Biju Janata Dal has not worked as the BJP thinks Sambit Patra and Aparajita Sarangi have the best chance to win from Puri and Bhubaneswar respectively. But the BJD was not ready to part with these seats.
The BJP has not declared candidates for any seat in Punjab so far where talks with the Akali Dal are ongoing and the state goes to polls in the last phase on June 1.
In Maharashtra, the BJP has declared candidates for 23 seats out of the 27 it plans to contest in an alliance with Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar.
Compared to the BJP’s 402 candidates so far, the Congress has declared nominees for 193 seats out of the 280-odd it plans to contest in the upcoming elections. While the BJP has declared nearly all its high-profile candidates including PM Modi and Amit Shah in the first list itself from their traditional seats of Varanasi and Gandhinagar respectively, the Congress has so far inexplicably not declared who will contest from its traditional seats of Raebareli and Amethi.
In a do-for-die election, one would have expected the Gandhi brother-sister duo to be the first names on the Congress list from Amethi and Raebareli to convince the cadre that the party means business in these polls. But the suspense is still on, with the BJP also keeping its Raebareli pick on hold as it awaits the Congress to blink first.
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