Back To The Drawing Board

Following successive bypoll defeats, the BJP is drawing up a plan to win back lost ground. But there may be far too many hurdles on the road to 2019

- Uday Mahurkar

Despite the unbearable June summer, the national BJP headquarters at Delhi’s Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg is bustling with activity. The opposition victory in Karna­ taka and the BJP’s poor show in the subsequent bypolls in other states have failed to dampen the spirit of party workers. There is little time to be spent on introspection. The instruction from the top brass is clear—the party must prepare for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, keeping in mind the changed political scenario.

The united opposition has found chinks in the BJP’s Ut­ tar Pradesh armour and trumped the saffron party in three constituencies in the state this year. The BJP, too, believes that the index of unity against it is high and productive in UP, the state which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha. “UP is certainly an area of worry,” says a party leader. “But in other states, opposition unity will create a positive emotional impact for Narendra Modi and may end up uniting people against those who are bent upon uproot­ ing the honest prime minister.” Adds another leader: “We would be in danger if the CPI(M) joins hands with the TMC in West Bengal or the Congress joins hands with the BJD in Odisha or with KCR in Telangana. But that’s unlikely to happen. In UP we are only six per cent short of our target of getting 50 per cent of the vote to tackle the SP­BSP challenge. With some course correction, that is not difficult.” The party does not consider Kairana, with 33 per cent Muslim population and 61 per cent voting this time as against 73 per cent in 2014, as a reliable barom­ eter of the BJP’s standing in UP.