BJP reworks poll strategy to take on SP-BSP

NEW DELHI: The Uttar Pradesh BJP cadre, still smarting under the shocking Gorakhpur and Phulpur bypoll defeats, is re-strategising its moves to avoid a similar reversal in the 2019 polls, even as the Yogi government completed a year in office on Monday amid lukewarm celebrations.

ET spoke to senior UP Ministers, close aides of the CM and key BJP strategists who said that they would remind people of the “double-barrel” corruption and lawlessness under the reign of SP and BSP through an aggressive campaign; promote their own backward classes leaders; re-ignite their booth management machine and focus on villages.

“We will expose this (SP-BSP) alliance –– which was a double-barrel of corruption and lawlessness under the BSP and SP regimes respectively. Also, we did not deploy our doublebarrel weapons in these bypolls –– the appeal and campaign strength of PM Narendra Modi and chanakya neeti of Amit Shah which will be showcased in 2019,” UP health minister Sidharth Nath Singh told ET. UP’s power minister, Shrikant Sharma, said the party will tell people through an aggressive campaign of how the “SP-BSP alliance is only for their own selfish benefit,” and not in the state’s benefit.


“We will ask who their leader is –– Mayawati, Akhilesh or Mulayam Singh. Also, what will UP’s people gain by voting for them in a Lok Sabha election?” Sharma said. BJP spokesman and a close CM aide, Chandra Mohan, said people had not forgotten the “sins” of SP-BSP over 15 years. “2019 mein PM ka face hoga aur CM ka kaam hoga,” Mohan said.

A senior party strategist admitted the SP-BSP was banking on converting 2019 election into a ‘forward backward’ election to defeat the BJP.