Drawing lessons from the BSP, the BJP has shifted gears a year before the term of the present Government ends and sent out express instructions to all its state units to send in their panel of nominations for next Lok Sabha elections by May 31. States going to polls in November have, however, been left out as the party wants to wait for their results first. Cautious, so that it is not caught unawares by an unanticipated election announcement, instructions have also gone out for the BJP Central Election Committee to start the screening process with scheduled meetings starting June 15. In what is an exercise to identify candidates for the next parliamentary elections, almost a year away if held on schedule, the plan is to have a pool of Lok Sabha candidates ready by the month-end. “The BSP has shown how an early announcement of the candidates enhances their chances exponentially. Our short-listing exercise is almost complete in around 200 seats,” a top leader said. The party’s informal “Core Group” on Elections, with M Venkaiah Naidu as coordinator and Ananth Kumar as secretary, has also discussed “lessons from Gujarat” for the forthcoming LS elections. “Modi succeeded because he was able to micromanage the elections. It may not be possible to directly call the booth committee members during a national election, as Modi would often do, but we are debating a blueprint that can be applied nationwide,” said a member of the seven-member apex team.“Our list will be ready by the month-end. Two to four names will be suggested for various seats but there are seats that will have only one name. We’ll have Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s name for the Lucknow seat while Varun Gandhi’s name will be suggested from Pilibhit,” UP BJP president Ramapati Ram Tripathi told The Indian Express.Bihar BJP chief Radha Mohan Singh, facing the heat due to the rebellion against Sushil Kumar Modi, said he was “half-way through in the exercise”. “We have already surveyed the constituencies altered as a result of delimitation. Our state core committee will meet before the national executive to shortlist names for the 16 seats (out of 54 in Bihar) where the party had fielded its candidates in the last elections,” he said.Similarly, in Haryana, state BJP chief Atma Chand Mahajan hopes to complete the exercise soon. Uttarakhand BJP chief Bachi Singh Rawat, however, says there have been “large-scale changes in the constituency profiles, post-delimitation, and that he hopes to discuss the issue with the leadership during the executive before sending in the names”.States like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, going to elections in the next few months will, however, not send in the names.The party is concentrating on the 297 seats that it has won at “some point of time”. Party functionaries are already touring states to assess these seats, as also the delimitation-affected constituencies. Leaders like Sumitra Mahajan and Prakash Javdekar have been touring Uttar Pradesh while Thevar Chand Gehlot was recently in Haryana. Leaders loaned from the RSS like Raj Ram Pandey have been holding daylong camps for booth-committee members in Uttar Pradesh that was a key factor in ensuring Modi’s win in Gujarat.
