With a sharp eye on the Madhya Pradesh Assembly poll in 2023, BJP president JP Nadda on Thursday held a meeting with senior leaders of the State unit, including Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, and sought them to gear up the State organization to avoid a repeat of the poll result of 2018 when it narrowly missed power to the Congress before ousting it in 2020 by roping in Jyotiraditya Scindia and his loyalists.
While elections are due in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat by this year end, the assembly polls will be held in seven other key states namely Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Tripura , Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland in 2023.
BJP has mobilized its organizational machinery for Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat-both the party-ruled states but also kept a keen eye on the geographically largest state of Madhya Pradesh which is at the heart of BJP’s ‘Hindi-belt’ politics.
The Madhya Pradesh government under Kamal Nath was toppled by the BJP with senior Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia crossing over to the BJP with 20-odd loyalist MLAs in 2020. MP sends in 29 Members of Parliament to the Lok Sabha.
In the 2018 Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP had lost the elections narrowly and the Congress initially went on to form the Government.
The meeting, which was held at 11 Ashoka Road, the BJP's old headquarters, took stock of poll preparations and sought to strengthen booth-level penetration of the party vis-Ã -vis the Congress, the principal opponent.
Besides Chouhan, the meeting was attended by BJP's state president VD Sharma, senior minister in the state government Narottam Mishra and the party's national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya.
BJP's poll in-charge for the state Muralidhar Rao and the party's national general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh were also present in the meeting.
Nadda , who has recently visited Swai Madhopur in Rajasthan and later held over a four-hour meeting at his residence here with the state leaders, including former Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, to put an end to ‘factionalism’ in the state has also been holding meeting with leaders from states which are slated for polls, next year.
The BJP president visited Karnataka and attended the state executive meet and took an overview of election preparations for 2023 under Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai.
The party president this month also went to Himachal Pradesh, his home state which would go to polls this year-end, and interacted with Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur whom he declared as the Chief Ministerial face for the November 2022 Assembly polls.