A day before the Parivartan Yatra is to take off, several BJP leaders, including Uttarakhand BJP election campaign committee in-charge and Union Health Minister JP Nadda, State BJP in-charge Shyam Jaju and the State BJP president Ajay Bhatt, were present when puja and other rituals to consecrate the two chariots, slated to crisscross Garhwal and Kumaon regions, were performed in Dehradun.
The chariots would be flagged off by the BJP national president Amit Shah after his address at a public rally at Race Course in Dehradun on Sunday.
Pinning its hopes on the yatra proving instrumental in bringing about the change in the state, the party top brass has pressed two high profile leaders and Union Cabinet Ministers JP Nadda and Dharmendra Pradhan who are acting as the party in-charges of the election due in a few months.
The importance the party is lending to the yatra can be gauged from the fact that the national party chief Amit Shah himself would address three rallies- in Dehradun, in Almora and in Haldwani-in course of the yatra.
The rally in Dehradun would be held on Sunday, the maiden day of the yatra while two other rallies in Kumaon would be held later. The yatra would culminate at Haldwani on December 8 through the rally to be addressed by Shah.
The political analysts say that the turnout at the rallies would help Shah, supposed to be a shrewd analyst of the people’s mood, to gauge which way the wind is blowing in the poll-bound State. “We can hardly forget the fact that Shah was the architect of the BJP’s unprecedented success in the most populous state UP during the 2014 election. It is to be seen whether he has any magic rabbit to pull out of his hat during the rallies he would address to give the cutting edge to his party’s campaign,” said an observer.
It is clear that Shah is reposing his full faith in two shrewd tacticians of the party- Nadda, which has come up the ladder from the grassroots, now the face of BJP in Himachal Pradesh, and Pradhan who has a better understanding of the pulse of Uttarakhand, given his past dealing with the State during the 2012 election.
Quizzed over the CM face the party might project, he had quipped some days ago while in Dehradun that he would not repeat the same mistake committed during the last election. Though the reply sounds murky observers say that the party would go the whole hog this time to wrest the state from the Congress. “In case the yatra proves a fiasco they would fall on other things to sway the voters the intended way,” said an observer.