BJP gets poll ready in Gujarat: Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Arun Jaitley to visit state in September

With a flurry of visits by BJP national leaders planned this month and a comprehensive strategy targeting 150 seats in the 182-member Gujarat Assembly under its belt, BJP has blown the poll bugle for Gujarat Assembly Election slated to take place later this year. [caption id=“attachment_3994871” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of Narendra Modi, Amit Shah. PTI[/caption] Starting with the visit of finance minister Arun Jaitley on 3 September as poll in-charge to oversee the election preparations, Gujarat will see the party president Amit Shah visiting the state a week later. Shah is expected to address a Town Hall from Gandhinagar and video conference with people who will be present in 100 different locations. A week after Shah’s visit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will touch down in his home state along with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe for the ground breaking ceremony of the high speed rail network between Ahmedabad and Mumbai at Sabarmati railway station in Ahmedabad, livemint.com said. Modi will return to Gujarat on 17 September — on his birth day — to participate in the culmination of the Narmada Mahotsav Yatra and address a public rally possibly in Sadhu Bet, a riverine island facing the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada, and the location of the Statue of Unity, a large statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the website said. Modi is expected to announce at least three dam-related projects that day coupled with 80 Narmada yatras to travel across Gujarat with political messaging from the BJP The Hindu said in its report. With Modi’s visit, the ruling party is hoping to leave behind the setback it suffered earlier in August when it failed to block the re-nomination of veteran Congress leader Ahmed Patel in the Rajya Sabha election. The high profile visits were preceded by the appointment of Union finance minister Arun Jaitley as in-charge of the poll-bound state along with Narendra Singh Tomar, Nirmala Sitharaman, Jitendra Singh, PP Chaudhary as co-in-charges in August. On 31 August, party chief Amit Shah held a session at his residence with the party leaders tasked with leading its charge in the election and chalked out a blueprint to achieve party’s mission of winning 150 seats, The Indian Express reported. In the last elections in 2012, when Modi was the state’s chief minister, the BJP had won 116 seats. In 2007 and 2002, two other polls it fought under Modi, it had won 117 and 127 seats. With Modi now the prime minister, the party strives to win 150 seats, Shah had told party leaders in Gujarat earlier, The Indian Express said. Talking about the challenges before BJP, the party is aware that the Patidar agitation in 2015 and the Una flogging incident that targeted Dalits need to be dealt with seriously but leaders are quite upbeat for having weaned 15 MLAs of the Congress away, with the Opposition’s main leader Shankersinh Vaghela declaring himself as a dissident and quitting his MLA seat as well. Congress, on the other hand, has seen a silver lining of hope after the recent victory of Ahmed Patel in the Rajya Sabha election. It now aims to put its weight behind booth-level workers and plans to deploy four dedicated party workers at each booth of 100 votes and 25 of them at 1,000-vote booths, Business Standard reported. The daily further said that Congress is also banking upon its vice president Rahul Gandhi to give a boost to its campaign by attending a workers’ meeting in Ahmedabad on 4 September. In an interview with PTI, Gujarat Congress chief Bharatsinh Solanki said Congress is set to make ‘happiness index’ its poll plank to garner support in poll-bound Gujarat as a counter to BJP’s agenda of development and growth in the state. “We will make this election as ‘happiness index’ versus the development touted by the BJP. This election will be fought not on development but on ‘happiness index,” the state Congress president said. Solanki also said that the party is carrying out surveys to select its candidates and will try and evolve a consensus among various contenders to stop infighting.