Lucknow: Eyeing the Uttar Pradesh elections early next year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has planned to attract women voters in the state with exclusive clubs and programmes.
While the party has announced plans to start ‘Kamal Saheli Clubs’ for women in urban areas along the lines of ‘kitty parties’, it will do ‘Gram Sabha Chaupals’ for rural women to sort out their issues. It is also planning constituency-wise Mahila Sammelans (women summits) across the state.
“Kamal Saheli Club is a concept similar to kitty party clubs. We will form a club of above 500 women in every constituency. Every month we will organise an event for them in which we plan some activities and winners will be felicitated by us. We will also invite our women leaders as chief guests,” UP BJP women’s wing (Mahila Morcha) state president Geeta Shakya told ThePrint.
According to her, the idea is to unite women in urban areas and to extend the party’s women outreach.
Shakya said the move will also help the party’s women leaders increase local contacts. “We will collect the data of all the women who come to our event. Our Mahila Morcha team will visit their houses for a cup of tea. In this way we increase our connection with them,” she said.
“Our primary focus is to promote party activities and government initiatives among these women. We will form WhatsApp groups also in which we keep adding them and inform about our activities,” she said.
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For rural voters
While ‘Kamal Saheli Club’ is for urban women, for rural women the party has two different programmes, a Mahila Morcha functionary told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
“Firstly, we will organise our ‘Gram Sabha Chaupal’ or ‘Mahila Chaupal’ from Navratri in October in which we will listen to the issues of rural women. After collecting notes of their issues, we will inform local representatives to solve it,” the functionary said.
“On zonal levels, we will also organise events to felicitate girls who score good marks in examination, this is our second programme. In this way we have planned to reach out to rural women across UP,” she said.
The party is planning to later woo couples as well in a similar fashion.
“After forming ‘Kamal Saheli Clubs’, we will organise ‘Couple Marathon’ on zonal level in which married couples will participate. It will be like another marathon but it’s a new concept on which we are working. Married couples of all age groups can participate in it,” Shakya said.
The functionary said ‘Kamal Saheli Clubs’ and ‘Couple Marathon’ are new concepts, adding that in 2014, the Chandigarh BJP conducted an innovative campaign ‘Kamal Mehandi and Rangoli’ to woo women voters of the city but “our initiative is of state level”.
‘Silent voters’
“After Bihar elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi revealed the importance of ‘silent voters’, where he defined women as his silent voters. Now in UP, they will be silent voters for both Modi and (CM) Yogi,” a UP BJP functionary told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
“The female voter population is above 40 per cent in UP, so their importance is huge. Schemes like Ujjwala Yojana, campaigns like ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ have increased our outreach already, Now we have to take it forward to another level through these events.”
(Edited by Amit Upadhyaya)
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