Aiming for a hat-trick, BJP tightens its party mechanism intensifying grassroot work ahead of 2024

In an effort to gauge the mood of its booth-level workers and reinvigorate them for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has deployed its senior office-bearers and seasoned leaders to identify and address any differences that may exist between its volunteers manning grassroots functions and district-level leadership—all closely managed by senior party leaders in Delhi.

As part of this pan-India initiative, with a special focus on Uttar Pradesh (UP) since August 2023, a select team of BJP leaders sitting in Delhi randomly selects two booth-level presidents from a district and shares their contact details with senior national- and state-level leaders, as informed by a senior BJP leader.

The latter are then asked to speak directly to them to find out the challenges and hurdles the booth-level chiefs may be facing in carrying out party activities with a focus on the 2024 parliamentary polls. The feedback is relayed back to Delhi, where efforts are made to improve relations between booth-level workers and district-level leaders, they explained.

The scale of the exercise can be gauged from the fact that just in UP, the saffron party has over 30 lakh booth workers.

“Names of two booth presidents of any assembly constituency in a day are randomly given as part of the exercise from Delhi. We are supposed to verify whether the names and contact numbers provided are correct and then enter into a dialogue with them to know their well-being, whether they are getting the needed support from their local MLAs and district-level office bearers, what efforts and initiatives at their level are underway to contact the voters and motivate them to vote for the party in 2024 polls, among other things,” said Anamika Chaudhary, BJP’s UP state secretary.

Chaudhary said that she has been doing this since September 2023, and the names of booth-level leaders provided can be anywhere in the state and even outside the state.

The usual issues that the booth-level workers share include a lack of support from the district president or local public representative, she added.

“So, we give the feedback to Delhi and also ensure that they enter into a dialogue to resolve the issues and work together in the party’s interest, keeping the forthcoming parliamentary polls in mind,” she explained.

Former UP cabinet minister and MLA from Allahabad West seat of Prayagraj, Sidharth Nath Singh, said that the BJP, as an organisation, has always believed that its strength lies with the booth-level workers and, therefore, has strived to have a robust feedback system between the top leaders and the booth-level workers, with information flowing both ways. “Knowing about their issues and problems, and resolving them are part of this very system,” he added.

Political analysts maintain that though already occupying a position of strength, the BJP continues to be minutely attentive to organisational matters, and that remains its real strength.

“BJP’s electoral results are mainly driven by PM Narendra Modi’s personal popularity and charisma, but its micro-management of voter mobilisation on the strength of its booth-level workers has always played a critical role in its victories as well. Therefore, the BJP constantly keeps its organisational machinery well-oiled and ready to go,” said Prof MP Dube, noted poll analyst and former vice-chancellor of Uttar Pradesh Rajarshi Tandon Open University (UPRTOU).

The party’s current efforts to gauge the problems of booth-level workers and resolve them appear to be part of its fine-tuning of the party’s booth management capacity. Its capacity to plan with strong organisational muscle is what makes the party different from all its rivals, added Prof Dubey, a former head of the political science department of Allahabad University.

In 2019, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had won 352 seats with the BJP on the strength of the Modi wave and its organisational strength, itself bagging 303 seats, with its allies Shiv Sena with 18 seats and Janata Dal United (JDU) with 16 seats emerging as two of its biggest contributors.

The alliance had won 64 seats out of the 80 on offer in UP, with the BJP winning 62 out of 78 that it contested and Apna Dal (Sonelal) bagging both seats that it contested as part of NDA.

In comparison, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had won just 91 seats, including 52 won by Congress, which has around 17.5 lakh booth-level workers in UP, followed by 23 seats by Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and 5 by Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), with its other allies chipping in with 21 seats. In UP, Congress had won just one out of the 67 seats that it contested, while rivals BSP had won 10 out of 38 seats that it entered its candidates, and Samajwadi Party (SP) had managed 5 out of 37 that it vied for.

BJP leaders would also be keeping the results of the 2022 assembly polls of UP in mind during the booth-level exercise and understand the party’s performance had been particularly underwhelming in the Purvanchal region where BJP and its allies had won 80 out of 107 assembly seats in 2017 but could bag just 63 seats in 2022.

Despite the party showcasing the Purvanchal expressway as an exemplar of BJP’s development model in the backward eastern UP, its efforts had been a dampener. Its main rival SP and its allies had won four out of the eight districts through which the highway passes, namely Ghazipur, Mau, Ambedkarnagar and Azamgarh, losing only one seat of Mau.

“BJP is now focusing more on the Purvanchal region and has announced many development projects for the districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh in the past few months. This could help it strengthen its position in the region,” said Prof Badri Narayan, another well-known political commentator and director of Prayagraj-based GB Pant Social Science Institute.

Senior BJP leader and UP deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, in September 2023 itself, has expressed confidence of the BJP winning all the 80 seats in the state during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls immediately after the saffron party suffering a loss in the Ghosi assembly bypoll. SP candidate Sudhakar Singh had defeated BJP’s Dara Singh Chauhan by a margin of 42,759 votes in Ghosi constituency of Mau district where the bypoll was necessitated after Chauhan, an Other Backward Classes (OBC) leader, had quit SP and joined BJP.