The next round of Assembly polls on his mind, Home Minister Amit Shah is tipped to be travelling to Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu this month and frequently afterwards as the BJP looks to retain power in Bihar with its allies and expand its footprints in the two other states.
Sources said Shah is expected to hold the BJP organisational meetings almost every month in these states till the polls.
He is likely to be in West Bengal on April 14 and 15 and in Bihar on April 30, they said, adding that the programme for Tamil Nadu is being finalised.
While the Bihar Assembly election is due in October-November, both West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are slated to go to polls in March-April next year, along with Assam, Kerala and Puducherry.
The BJP is the biggest partner in Bihar's ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which includes the Janata Dal (United) and the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), among others. JD(U) president Nitish Kumar has been the chief minister of the state for almost 20 years.
However, the party faces a different kind of challenge in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.
Its energetic efforts to emerge as a principal political force in West Bengal have so far met with only partial success as it has emerged as the main challenger to the Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, but fallen short in its efforts to end her uninterrupted reign since 2011.
During his intervention in the Waqf (Amendment) Bill in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, Shah had turned combative after being at the receiving end of TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee's barbs related to the state's politics.
Shah asked Banerjee not to make the debate in Parliament a battleground for political point-scoring, asserting that he will do so in Bengal. "Let me say it emphatically that the BJP will get more seats in Bengal (this time)," he had added.
The TMC had won 215 and the BJP 77 seats in the 294-member Bengal Assembly in 2021.
Always a marginal player in Tamil Nadu, the saffron party is widely expected to revive its alliance with the main opposition, AIADMK, in its bid to take on the ruling DMK-led INDIA bloc in the southern state, where the incumbent alliance has been dominant since coming to power in 2021.
AIADMK leader Edappadi K Palaniswami met Shah recently, fuelling the prospect of the two parties coming together.
The AIADMK and the BJP were allies in the 2021 Assembly polls but the Dravidian party walked out of the alliance later and the two parties went separate ways in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Both suffered a rout in Tamil Nadu.
