Amit Shah Chairs BJP Meet to Ready Roadmap For MP Assembly Elections

Bhopal: A high-level meeting of senior BJP leaders, held at the official residence of Union home minister Amit Shah at Delhi late on Sunday night, prepared the four-month road map for the party to retain power in the state in the year-end assembly elections.

The road map has basically focussed on various outreach programmes proposed to be undertaken in the coming four months, leading to the upcoming assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, slated for November this year, a senior BJP leader who attended the meeting told this newspaper on Monday, unwilling to be quoted.

“The BJP will intensify its mass contact exercises in the coming days. This is the key feature of the four-month road map prepared by the party for the polls”, he added.

Besides Mr Shah, who chaired the meeting, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, convener of state election committee of the party and Union minister Narendra Singh Tomar, party’s state election in-charge and Union minister Bhupender Yadav, co poll in-charge and Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and state BJP president V D Sharma attended the meeting.

Mr Sharma submitted a report detailing progress made in the poll preparations by the party so far and on the mass contact programmes undertaken to generate awareness on the various welfare schemes of the Centre and the state government among the people in the state, to Mr Shah.

The meeting, which spilled over to past midnight on Sunday, also discussed the preparations being made by the party for the scheduled visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Sagar in Madhya Pradesh on August 12 to lay foundation for the proposed grand temple of Santi Ravidas, the revered figure among the dalits.

Sources said that Mr Shah was also scheduled to visit Jabalpur and Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh where he was scheduled to address public meetings, besides reviewing the poll preparedness by the party in Mahakoshal and Gwalior-Chambal regions.

However, the visit schedules were yet to be finalised, sources said.

Sources said that the meeting also reviewed the ongoing exercises to reach out to the senior BJP leaders who have been nurturing the grievances of being marginalised in the party, to deploy them in the campaign.

Senior party leaders including Mr Chouhan, Mr Tomar and Mr Sharma have been approaching the sulking BJP leaders to remove ‘misunderstandings’ and rope in their support in the polls.

“The party has turned its focus on reaching out to the sulking BJP leaders to involve them in the campaign, instead of tapping the dissident leaders in other parties, particularly the Congress, to induct them into the party”, another BJP functionary said here.