New Delhi: The NDA’s victory in the Bihar polls is the first electoral triumph for Jagat Prakash Nadda as BJP president, since taking over in January this year. And now, following his predecessor Amit Shah’s expansion model, Nadda is preparing to travel nationwide over a period of 100 days starting in the first week of December.
As part of his ‘pravas’, Nadda will make night halts in state capitals, tour booth centres, interact with intellectuals, and meet the BJP’s booth-level chiefs and large sections of workers to prepare the future road map and strengthen the party in focus states like Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal, all of which are scheduled for assembly polls in the next two years.
The elaborate ‘Bharat Pravas’ programme was discussed in length at Sunday’s national office-bearers meeting chaired by Nadda, and the decision was taken that Nadda should tour the country, since it was one of the most crucial organisational initiatives that Shah had pushed as BJP chief. It helped him understand the party’s strengths and weaknesses at the ground level, leading to many feedback-based programmes.
Just last week, as the BJP celebrated winning 74 seats in Bihar, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had patted Nadda’s back for the victory, and even asked a crowd of workers and leaders at the party’s headquarters in New Delhi to raise the slogan: “Nadda ji aage badho, hum tumhare saath hain (Nadda ji move forward, we are with you).”
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How Nadda will divide his time
Nadda’s tour will start in the first week of December and will last three months, though it could be prolonged because the West Bengal assembly election campaign is expected to take place around the same time. Nadda will campaign in other states going to the polls, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam, separately.
The states that Nadda will visit have been divided into three categories according to their size and the BJP’s local strength — he will stay three days each in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Rajasthan, among other large states; two days each in states like Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh; and one day each in the Northeastern states.
A BJP general secretary told ThePrint on the condition of anonymity: “It will be his first nationwide ground feedback tour since after taking over as president in January. Initially, he was busy with the Delhi assembly elections (in February), and then the Covid-19 pandemic happened. Since then, he has undertaken a massive seva abhiyaan (service campaign), interacting with leaders and workers digitally, throughout the Covid period.
“After our win in the Bihar elections, he has time to make the organisation ready for state elections where we are in a weak position, to take feedback, and to make a blueprint for the next general elections in 2024. Nine objectives have been decided for his tour, and communicated to the state units.”
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Reaching out to workers’ families
Expanding on the details of Nadda’s visits to the states, a leader involved in making the ‘Bharat Pravas’ programme told ThePrint that it will be designed to ensure the BJP chief stays with leaders not only in state capitals, but in different centres.
“He will get a real sense of the organisational activity and the party’s preparations for the future. In states where the party is in power with an alliance partner, he will meet the other parties’ leaders too for better coordination,” the leader said.
“In states where the BJP is aspiring to become a dominant player, like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, he will meet a cross-section of intellectual and influential people to get a sense about the party strategy,” he added.
In every state, Nadda will meet intellectuals, as well as BJP booth pramukhs (chiefs) and Shakti Kendra pramukhs.
A vice-president of the party said: “Nadda ji will also visit the pramukhs’ and district presidents’ homes and meet their families, magnifying his connect with the party at the grass roots. In places where he stays the night, there will be organisational meetings, review meetings, core committee meetings and dinners with party workers. In some places, there will be dinner at workers’ homes.”
The vice-president added: “Amit Shah has expanded the BJP into those areas where the party was never a player, like West Bengal, Tripura, Manipur and many states of the Northeast. Nadda’s challenge is to expand the party in Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. However, Shah himself is supervising the expansion plan in West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, so Nadda can afford to focus on other states. But he will have to keep tabs on the execution of the plan.”
Shah’s pravas blueprint
Shah, over five years as BJP president, spent more than 400 days travelling across states, and staying there on more than 300 nights instead of returning to Delhi. He has covered 3.38 lakh kilometres for the organisation, and 4.52 lakh kilometres for election campaigns, according to the book, Amit Shah and the March of the BJP, by Anirban Ganguly, director of the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation.
A BJP leader recalled one particular tour of Uttar Pradesh, when Shah was in Amethi to oversee election preparations. “A meeting ran long and ended only at 2 am, and party leaders hoped he would return to Lucknow, which was only an hour and a half away. But he insisted on staying put in Amethi, and spent the night in the meeting location, which was a warehouse of a Dalda vegetable oil factory. All other leaders followed suit. This way, he revived the ratri pravas concept, which we have practised during our RSS days,” the leader said.
“Nadda ji has worked closely with Amit Shah before becoming BJP president, and he knows the importance of booth visits and night pravas, which has helped us in organisational outreach in a massive way. Nadda is only following Shah’s footprints to galvanise the BJP organisation,” he added.
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That is why these people are ruling. Hard working i_diots can overpower even intelligent armchair politicians. Congress should simply disaband itself.
will this make him less fat