NEW DELHI: This round of assembly elections marked the key role played by
BJP’s second-rung
leaders who successfully executed the poll strategy on the ground and worked diligently at the booth and block levels.
Union ministers
Bhupender Yadav and Ashwini Vaishnaw
in Madhya Pradesh, senior party functionary Om Prakash Mathur and Union minister Mansukh Mandaviya in Chhattisgarh and Union minister Pralhad Joshi along with general secretary Arun Singh in Rajasthan played vital roles in shaping the party’s comprehensive win in three states.
Former UP minister Mahendra Singh was another functionary assigned with key constituencies in Rajasthan.
Taking a cue from the defeats in Karnataka and West Bengal, two states the party brass was sure of winning, the strategists deployed functionaries from different backgrounds rather than those with proven track records as poll managers and constantly sought seat-wise feedback from them.
Yadav and Mathur have long experience of steering the party’s campaign in various states while it was the first assignment for Vaishnaw, who stayed away from the limelight and focused on micro management, executing home minister Amit Shah’s directive to garner at least 51% votes for BJP.
State leaders like Nitin Nabin and Ajay Alok from Bihar were also deployed in Chhattisgarh and are said to have acted as the interface between central and state leaders. Recently-appointed general secretary Sunil Bansal, one of the key members of BJP’s think-tank, spent several days in Telangana as the party’s poll observer and played a role in selection of candidates and containing feuds among state leaders.
Sources said winning eight seats in Telangana has raised hopes of further consolidation in the state even as a section of the party believed that it had lost the momentum gained in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls when it won four seats, followed by a respectable finish in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation polls.
Other than top central leaders, UP CM Yogi Adityanath was one of the star campaigners and received good response in all four states. Adityanath addressed several rallies in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh where his law and order plank and the construction of Ram Mandir gave a boost to the party’s double engine slogan.