Eye on 2019 polls: Amit Shah to travel 1 lakh km in 5 months

NEW DELHI: BJP president Amit Shah is on election mode and will be clocking 88,000 km between the national and state capitals in a 5-month whirlwind nation-wide tour, through the summer to the end of monsoons, to strengthen BJP's election machinery for 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

This excludes travel for other political work that crops up in between April 25 and September 25. If one counts political itineraries outside state capitals, one expects Shah would travel almost 100,000 km in next five months. That is 20,000 km each month towards party’s organisational work for the ruling party president.

Shah’s nation-wide tour through the summer has been packed so tightly that the ruling party president may even have to miss the swearing-in of next President of India.

Shah’s tentative tour programme accessed by ET schedules him to be in stationed in Kerala on July 25-27. The new president of the country will be administered oath of office on July 25.




Shah will most likely be in attendance for the swearing-in ceremony for the vice-president of India in August. There is no outstation travel programme slated for ruling party president on August 11, when the new vice-president is slated to take over.

“This is a tentative programme. Obviously, it will be tweaked to attend to political calendar which is beyond his control. But, this tentative tour programme is crucial to provide time to respective state units to prepare for BJP president’s organisational visit," said a source, "the nationwide tour will provide opportunity to workers to interact with party national president. This will act to motivate party cadres and prepare state organisation for long haul beyond 2019 Lok Sabha elections."

Party leaders insist that Shah will not only have to be present in the national capital at the time of announcement of the regime’s party candidate but also be available for voting in the presidential elections; the schedule is yet to be announced by the Election Commission.

Shah will be travelling for over three months during the five-month period between April 25 and September 25 for his organisational visit. For this purpose, the central unit of the party has categorised states into three categories – A, B, C. While Category A states (19 states) are where Shah will stay for three days, given the size and the number of Lok Sabha MPs those states contribute to the Parliament. The BJP president will devote two days each in seven states under category B and a day each for nine states under C which include most union territories.

The issue of Shah’s tour for party work, highly placed BJP sources confided, had come up for extensive discussion during the marathon meeting of ruling party’s core group of leadership on April 19 at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence.

While Shah was learnt to have briefed the party’s core group about the his proposed tour, sources indicated that former party presidents like Rajnath Singh, Venkaiah Naidu and Nitin Gadkari, all of whom are part of the BJP’s core group, chipped in with their inputs and support for this exercise.