New Delhi: Gujarat BJP president C.R. Patil has set an ambitious target for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections — to secure victory in all 26 seats with a margin of five lakh votes in each, ThePrint has learnt. And when he says something, no one takes him lightly since he is known to walk the talk.
Take the 2022 Gujarat assembly election, when many in the opposition and even within the BJP predicted that the party would win around 120 of the state’s 182 seats. Patil was bolder, estimating that the BJP would win 150 seats. He was right.
The BJP bagged 156 seats, breaking the state record of 149 set by the Congress under Madhav Singh Solanki in 1985. Patil, who is said to be highly trusted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was accorded much of the credit for this historic victory due to his effective strategies.
Now, with his sights set on the Lok Sabha polls, Patil is urging party workers to not just work towards a score of 26/26 — a feat that the BJP also achieved in the 2014 and 2019 elections — but to ensure that all Congress rivals perform so miserably that they lose their security deposits.
Speaking to ThePrint, Patil said he had two major reasons to be confident — the Modi factor and the state’s “page committees” to micromanage voters.
“The Prime Minister’s popularity is at its highest and the government’s work has benefited everyone on the ground. Gujaratis are also emotionally connected to the PM,” he said.
“We may have some factors working against us, but we have analysed the situation and are confident that our page committee members can ensure that all our candidates will win by a huge margin,” he added.
The aforementioned “page committees” have been an effective tool in Patil’s electoral arsenal. In the 2022 assembly elections, these five-member committees were deployed to micromanage around 30 voters in each electoral page.
All members — about 82 lakh in all— were tasked with convincing their relatives and other close associates to vote for the BJP.
The strategy is an extension of the party’s panna pramukh (page chief) model, in which one person is charged with managing one page of the voters’ list.
BJP leaders who spoke to ThePrint said that they were as convinced as Patil that the page committees would help them exceed the already impressive performances that the party registered in the last two Lok Sabha elections.
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Setting the bar higher
The BJP won all 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat in 2014 and then not only repeated this feat but improved its vote-share in 2019.
In the 2019 election, the party received 62.2 per cent of the votes polled, up from 60 per cent in 2014. Further, 15 BJP candidates won by a margin of over 3 lakh votes compared to just six in 2014. A victory margin of less than two lakh votes was registered only in four constituencies — Dahod, Junagadh, Anand, and Patan.
Perhaps poetically, the highest margin of all — not just in Gujarat but the entire country, surpassing even PM Modi— was registered in Navsari, where C.R. Patil polled 6.9 lakh votes more than his nearest competitor, Dharmeshbhai Patel of the Congress.
Another top scorer was Amit Shah, now Union Home Minister, who won the Gandhinagar seat by a margin of 5.57 lakh votes. Darshana Jardosh (Ahmedabad East) and Ranjanben Bhatt (Vadodara) also beat out the competition by over five lakh votes, while Hasmukhbhai Somabhai Patel (Ahmedabad West) won by over four lakh votes, while the remaining candidates raced ahead in the range of two to over three lakh votes.
Now, the party wants to do even better, by ensuring that all candidates win by a margin of over five lakh votes.
According to a Gujarat BJP functionary, this was “not a very difficult task”.
“The BJP’s margin in the 2022 assembly poll was 85 lakh. We won 1.67 crore votes and the Congress got 86 lakh. In the 2019 general election, we received 1.80 crore votes. To achieve a five-lakh victory margin in all Lok Sabha constituencies, we only need to add 45 lakh more votes, which is not a very difficult task for the party,” he claimed.
He added that Lok Sabha polls were “easier” than assembly elections since people were more likely to cast their vote in favour of PM Modi rather than the local candidate.
Page committees & poll math
The BJP’s resounding victory in the 2022 assembly poll had a lot to do with the “scientific” and “robust” strategies deployed by C.R. Patil, party leaders say. Indeed, even PM Modi gave credit for the win to Patil and the state unit he deftly managed.
A major winner among Patil’s strategy were the five-member page committees, together comprising 82 lakh registered members. Each committee has to ensure votes from a page of 30 voters.
“If two members of the page committee ensure two votes, we could easily win all Lok Sabha seats. But to ensure a bigger victory margin, we have to ensure every member ensures three votes of their family and friends. It will translate to 2.4 crore votes, which is not impossible to achieve,” said a senior state BJP functionary.
Speaking to ThePrint, BJP state general secretary Bhargav Bhatt shed further light on the party’s calculations.
“In the 2022 assembly election, we got 1.67 crore votes, which is 27 lakh more votes than 2017. In the Lok Sabha elections, we normally get more votes. In 2019, it was 1.80 crore votes. We have to add 40-45 lakh votes to get a bigger victory margin. If 70-75 per cent of our page committee members perform, we can achieve the target of a bigger margin victory in Lok Sabha,” he said.
Bhargav added that the fight was not just to win, but to win bigger “as Patil ji has fixed the target to achieve”.
He said that the results of the assembly elections have been analysed and now the state unit is working on adding more page committees ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.
State BJP vice-president Gordhan Zadafia told ThePrint that to achieve its ambitious victory margin target, the party needs to get at least “6.4 lakh votes” in every constituency.
“Normally, in every Lok Sabha constituency, on average 15-16 lakh people live, and the average polling is around 8.40 lakh. We need to get 6.4 lakh votes in every Lok Sabha constituency to get that victory margin,” he said.
“Every page has an average of 30 voters. For victory, the needs 18 votes at every page, which is 60 per cent of polling. The party got 62 percent votes in 2019. If we add three votes at every page, getting 21 votes per page, we will achieve the target of winning every Lok Sabha seat by a five lakh margin easily,” he added.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
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