From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party is concentrating on 144 ‘weak’ Lok Sabha seats that it lost in the last elections to increase its vote share in 2024.
Home Minister Amit Shah’s idea is not to give up the lost seats in which the union ministers and other senior leaders were tasked to visit these constituencies by December-end, but he was not present in an assessment made this week since he was tied up with the Gujarat assembly elections.
An assessment meeting, third in the series, was chaired by BJP President Jagat Prakash Nadda to get the progress reports from the union ministers. Party sources said the deadline of December was fixed since most of the ministers and senior leaders are now busy with the Gujarat poll campaign.
Most leaders in the northern states have completed their assigned work and a public contract programme is to begin after the Gujarat elections.
In the assessment meeting on Wednesday, the leaders discussed the poll campaign for Mainpuri Lok Sabha byelection caused by the death of the Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav. Mainpuri is among 144 “weak seats” where the work to improve the BJP’s vote share had already begun before Mulayam’s death.
The Samaj Party has fielded Dimple Yadav, a former MP and wife of SP president Akhilesh Yadav. Pitted against her is Raghuraj Shakya, who joined the BJP just before the UP polls early this year.
