BJP prepares victory guide to replicate Uttar Pradesh win at other places

New Delhi: The formula for a landslide — post its extraordinary victory in Uttar Pradesh, BJP is preparing and will internally circulate a booklet that will explain strategies that resulted in the huge mandate.

The document, being put together by BJP’s UP unit, will be especially meant for BJP units in states that are headed for polls next — Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.

“We go to elections next in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. This booklet will explain the strategy adopted in UP and how it was so successful… other state units can study it,” BJP’s state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak told ET.


In the booklet, BJP will be highlighting four central schemes that worked best in the campaign, the party’s state spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi said.

“The Jan Dhan Yojana, the Ujjawala gas yojana, 20 lakh toilets constructed in UP under Swachh Bharat and the Neemcoated Urea scheme — these four schemes clicked the most in UP. The booklet will explain how we took our message on these schemes to voters,” Tripathi added.

The booklet will also mention that for the first time, BJP built a database of 14 crore voters in UP, with as many as 27 classifications, including gender, caste and economic profile. This database was used to determine election strategy and ticket distribution.

BJP’s UP unit is also highlighting the creation of an 11.52 lakh-strong booth-level workers team that manned 1.47 lakh polling booths in UP. This vast team took the party’s message deep into UP’s interiors, the booklet says, and it further points to the meeting of boothlevel workers in Lucknow on January 2, which was addressed by the prime minister and which acted as a “big motivator” for these workers.

“UP’s BJP unit has brought on board maximum members —nearly 2 crore people in UP are members of the BJP now. A dedicated call centre of BJP stayed in constant touch with booth workers. It was a closely monitored campaign,” Tripathi told ET.

A senior BJP leader, who did not want to be identified, said before the Narendra Modi-led 2014 election campaign, in which Amit Shah was in charge of UP, the state unit was known as more a party of ‘disjointed leaders’ rather than workers.

“Eighty percent of our district presidents did not even have email addresses in 2014. Sunil Bansal changed the working culture. He brought accountability into the system.

Each district office was connected by computers and internet and reports sought on email,” this senior leader said.

BIG NUMBERS
The booklet will cite some big numbers – 50 lakh people were contacted through the Parivartan Yatras carried out by BJP, 8.39 lakh people participated in the Backward Wing meetings, 4.65 lakh people attended youth meetings and 2.5 lakh women attended 77 meetings for women voters. It will cite that 34 lakh ‘expectation letters’ were collected from the public and those insights were fed into BJP’s manifesto. And it will point to small details that were taken care of, like attaching a voter slip to appeals for a BJP vote that were sent to every family in UP before polling.

BJP used 400 GPS-fitted video vans used in UP and these telecast live speeches from the PM and Amit Shah. It deployed 1,649 motorcycles that the state unit says visited 76,000 villages and contacted 70 lakh households. These will also find mention in the booklet.