The Bharatiya Janata Party may announce its candidates early on its 160 "weak" Lok Sabha seats, much ahead of the elections to be announced by the Election Commission, to give them advantage of the first movers to beat the rivals.
The same strategy was adopted by it to declare candidates on 39 lost seats in the Assembly elections for 230 seats in Madhya Pradesh and 21 lost seats in 90 assembly seats in Chhattisgarh.
The party has already carried out a massive exercise of strengthening its standing on the Lok Sabha seats. Many senior leaders and union ministers have worked on them over several months.
Decision to made after elections in five states
Most of these seats are in the south and east where the BJP is yet to taste power on its own. The party sources said the announcement of candidates on the "weak" Lok Sabha seats will be taken after the conclusion of the Assembly elections in five states. Either Home Minister Amit Shah or BJP president Jagat Prakash Nadda have addressed a public rally in each Lok Sabha seat, besides making personal assessment from the local leaders.
While the 160 Lok Sabha seats are mostly seats that the BJP lost in 2019 but they also include some of its winning constituencies where they remain a challenge because of local social and political factors. The leadership is to expand its organisational machinery and boost its voter outreach.
The party had drawn a similar list of difficult seats in the run-up to the 2019 polls and it had won a large number of them. It won 303 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha in 2019 as against 282 in 2014.
The difficult seats in the 2019 elections include Raebareli constituency of former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and Mainpuri constituency of Dimple Yadav, wife of Samajwadi president Akhilesh Yadav.
BJP to send MLAs to poll-bound states
Another new experiment launched by the BJP is to send its MLAs from other states to study the party prospects in the Assembly elections slated this year in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, besides gathering information from the surveys by various agencies as also information from the social media.
The MLAs camped for five to seven days in each Assembly constituency. Their travel will conclude this month end when they will give their reports of each constituency. The feedback from them will be crucial in case of Rajasthan where the party did not declare its candidates in advance.
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