Known for its knack for quick decision-making and preparing well in advance when it comes to polls, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has laid down an elaborate roadmap for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections scheduled to be held in 2024. Booth-level connect with voters, which has been a strategy that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is known to repeatedly stress upon, features prominently in the blueprint rolled out by the BJP two ahead of polls. 

With PM Modi having declared that the election results in the recently held UP elections were a clear sign of which way the wind would blow in 2024, the BJP is leaving nothing to chance and has drawn up a plan to cover all booths spread across 2,300 Assembly constituencies where the party has an MP or an MLA. It has also identified more booths in 100 Lok Sabha constituencies that the BJP candidates could not win so far, The Indian Express reported today, citing sources.

A four-member team led by BJP vice-president Baijayant Panda has drawn up the strategy with a view to maximise the party’s reach and electoral wins, the report quoted a team member as saying. The other members of the team include BJP general secretaries C T Ravi and Dilip Ghosh and party’s Scheduled Castes (SC) cell head Lal Singh Arya. 

The team is expected to undertake a pan-India tour in the next three months to put the plan into action. According to The Indian Express, the committee held a meeting at the party’s Delhi headquarters on Monday. BJP president J P Nadda is expected to launch the mission officially next week.

“The committee will be working with the party MPs and MLAs – 2,300 of them – across the country, state presidents and district presidents in the coming three months. We have to ensure that the BJP does not lose any of the seats it has already won. There will be training sessions and frequent meetings for those in these booths,” the leader told IE.

In 2016, the BJP had put a similar plan into action for the 2019 Lok Sabhja elections which it eventually won by a huge margin. As part of its strategy, it had identified around 115 constituencies that the party had never been able to win in six states — Odisha, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala — and the Northeast. 

A majority of the “new catchment areas” identified in its plan for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections lie in the southern and eastern states.