New Delhi, March 1
To sharpen its attack against the UPA government and strategise for the Assembly polls in the run-up to the general elections, the two-day National Council meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party, gets underway here tomorrow.

This will be the first such exercise the party will undertake after the appointment of Rajnath Singh as the BJP president earlier this year. Although the party and its senior leadership prefer to project the power transition as a “natural process”, the change of guard from Nitin Gadkari to the incumbent came about in a rather dramatic manner.

At the meeting, appointment of Rajnath Singh will be ratified, paving the way for the new chief to announce his team. It will also allow the party to deliberate on preparations for Assembly elections especially in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where it is in power, and Rajasthan, where the BJP hopes to wrest power from the Congress.

Work required in Karnataka where the party had suffered a setback with the exit of strongman BS Yeddyurappa and Chief Minister Jagdish Shettar who faces an uphill task would also be reviewed.

The meeting comes at a time when a vocal section in the party is pushing for Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s projection as the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, amid frequent re-iterations from the central leadership that the decision will be taken by the party’s parliamentary board at an appropriate time.

While the Modi factor is a matter of internal dynamics, the two-day meet will see the BJP under Rajnath Singh draw the contours of its political and economic policies in contrast to those being pursued by the Congress-led UPA.

At the day-long session of the party National Executive today, Rajnath Singh made it a point to acknowledge the singular distinction of Modi as being the first from the party stables to win Assembly election for the third time in a row.

While party spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad said too much should not be read into the special mention, he said work of two other Chief Ministers Raman Singh of Chhattisgarh and Shivraj Singh Chauhan of Madhya Pradesh was acknowledged too especially in the field of distribution of food grain and agricultural growth, respectively.

In his address, the BJP Chief launched a fresh offensive against the Congress-led UPA accusing it of having mismanaged the economy and described the Budget proposals as a “jugglery of figures”.