New Delhi, April 29
A panic- stricken BJP is firing on all cylinders to arrest its downslide in Uttar Pradesh as the party today deputed another top leader to the state to mobilise its cadres ahead of the remaining two crucial rounds of polls on May 5 and 10.
The party today announced that its vice-president and RSS veteran Pyare Lal Khandelwal would camp in Uttar Pradesh beginning Sunday to monitor the campaigning and to mobilise effectively party workers at the grassroots level.
The late realisation has come about after internal reports from the ground level have clearly indicated that there had not been any major impact of the public rallies and other big meetings and there was need to focus more on door to door and assembly and booth level campaigning, party sources said.
Significantly, Mr Khandelwal is the second “hardcore” RSS leader of the party to be deputed to Uttar Pradesh. A couple of days back, party general secretary Sanjay Joshi was asked to camp in Uttar Pradesh till the final phase of polls on May 10.
Interestingly, Mr Khandelwal, who was in charge of Uttar Pradesh during the presidentship of Mr Jana Krishnamurthy, was asked to camp in Madhya Pradesh, but an SOS phone call was made by party president M Venkaiah Naidu to the former after he reached Jabalpur to reach Uttar Pradesh, party sources said.
Mr Khandelwal, who had extensively toured Uttar Pradesh during the Assembly polls in the state in 2002, will be monitoring and supervising the party activities in 18 of the 20 seats going for polls in Western Uttar Pradesh.
The BJP had won just six seats — Bijnaur, Bareilly, Pilibit, Khurja, Bulandshahar and Hapur — in Western Uttar Pradesh.
When contacted Mr Khandelwal told The Tribune that his priority would be to apply correctives wherever needed in the strategy already adopted by the party unit in Uttar Pradesh.
Most importantly, the grass-root level workers and other important party leaders would help the party to ensure that its “traditional and cadre voters” turn up in good numbers on the polling day.
He said his immediate task would be to activate five important and influential party workers in each assembly segment in all the parliamentary constituencies.
“Since time is limited and the task is clearly cut out, I will not indulge in any big experiment on the existing campaign strategy, but definitely give the necessary corrective direction,” Mr Khandelwal said.
Mr Khandelwal was in charge of the North-East and Orissa where polls were held in the first and second rounds of polling.
Meanwhile, party general secretary Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi asserted that the BJP would emerge as the number one party in Uttar Pradesh and claimed that the Vajpayee-led NDA would get comfortable majority in the Lok Sabha.
He said the result of the two exit polls had created half a dozen claimants for Prime Ministership from the “benami” Opposition alliance and the trend visible would certainly throw a dozen prime ministerial aspirants by the time last phase of polling is over.
