Sources in the party who are part of the team stationed in Mizoram say they began work in February to build the BJP’s presence from the ground-up.
New Delhi: The BJP has begun groundwork to establish its presence in Mizoram, the only state among the northeast’s ‘Seven Sisters’ where it is yet to consolidate its position.
Since coming to power at the Centre in 2014, the BJP has assumed office in the other six states — Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh — either by winning elections or forging alliances, establishing itself in a region that has never been its stronghold.
Sources in the party who are part of the team stationed in Mizoram say they began work in February to build the BJP’s presence from the ground-up, adding that the general secretary in-charge of the northeast, Ram Madhav, is expected to join them within the next one month.
Elections to the 40-member assembly are due at the end of the year, along with assembly polls in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
From the ground-up
According to the sources, a team was first sent to the state three months ago to test waters and begin voter outreach. Thus began efforts to form booth-level committees, hold meetings, and plan and identify key issues to reach out to voters with — a well-planned exercise on the lines of the BJP’s successful experiment in former Left citadel Tripura earlier this year.
“In Mizoram, the BJP didn’t have much of a reach. So, the idea has been to build the organisation from the ground to the state level. We started forming booth-level committees, of which 70 per cent is done so far and we expect to finish the remaining by June,” said a member of the BJP team working in Mizoram. “We have also focused extensively on youth and women outreach,” the member added.
With the booth-level committees nearly ready, the focus will next be on appointing panna pramkuhs (page in-charges), another important cog in the BJP’s ground-up organisational structure. One panna pramukh is in-charge of each page in the electoral roll and has the duty to knock on the door of each voter to spread the party’s message. Sources say the selection of workers and assignment of this duty would be done between June and August.
The party is also training local cadres in fighting elections. Some of its workers were, in fact, taken to Meghalaya ahead of the polls there earlier this year so they could gain first-hand experience. Sources say vistaraks or full-time workers will be appointed and a team from Assam might be brought in to train them, as was done in Tripura.
Sources say the party is also relying on attracting Congress workers, to give itself a readymade cadre base. This was a strategy that worked for it in Tripura, where it found an easy way to create a cadre base by bringing Congress workers on its side. Each Congress leader who joined brought with her/him around 3,000-4,000 cadres.
“A lot of workers of our rival parties in the state are disillusioned and disgruntled. We think many will move towards the BJP with hope,” a BJP worker in Mizoram said.
To cement its functioning and supervise ground strategy, Madhav is expected to reach the state next month.
Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam minister and convenor of the BJP-led North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), will also play a key role in the state. With his deep knowledge of the region, Sarma — who crossed over to the BJP from the Congress in 2015 — is a crucial cog in the party’s election machinery in the northeast. BJP leader and former MLA from Delhi, Pawan Sharma, is the prabhari (convenor) for the state.
Identifying key constituencies, issues
Besides its own organisational process, the party has also identified the constituencies it wants to primarily target — youth and women.
“According to our estimate, the first-time/young voters comprise about 30 per cent of the state’s electorate. We have seen how, in many recent elections, this constituency has been a deciding factor. Hence, in Mizoram, we have started extensive youth-interaction programmes,” said the member of the BJP’s Mizoram team.
“We are also targeting social media in a big way. Another section we are focusing on is women. Our mahila morcha (women wing) members are taking care of that,” the member added.
The party’s strategy is to base its campaign on the allegation that no development or infrastructure creation had taken place in the state in the last few decades of Congress/Mizo National Front (MNF) rule. Lack of employment, education and health opportunities would be the main focus issues, with the BJP planning to promise a reversal of the trend if voted to power.
“The traditional thought process has been that the BJP is not a part of the northeast. We have managed to successfully change that in the other states in the region, and hope to replicate the same here by tapping into local sentiment,” the BJP strategy team member said.
In the April local polls to the state’s Chakma Autonomous District Council, the ruling Congress had won six seats in the 20-member council, with the BJP managing to wrest five. The MNF, a constituent of the BJP-led North East Democratic Alliance, was the largest party in the council, with eight seats. In an unusual move, it was then decided that the BJP would rule the council with the support of the six Congress members.
Did it use the atrocious “Bharatiya Jesus Party” in Nagaland and Arunachan (last I checked, both States have namesake-Christian majorities) that it did recently in Karnataka? People of the other majority-Christian State (Mizoram) are, so far, too smart to fall for this — so it has no chance there!