22 crore in 2019 to 35 crore in 2024: BJP's strategy to increase votes polled in 5 years

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) BJP has laid out a detailed road map for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and for the party – the assembly polls that just ended were a trial run that went as per its plans.The party is scaling up the strategy it employed successfully in the three states — Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh — where tough contests were predicted but the verdicts were one-sided in favour of the BJP.It has already started working on mass-scale worker and voter mobilisation across the country, to be completed before the campaign formally starts for the Lok Sabha polls, according to party insiders. The core of the programme is reaching out to 800 millon beneficiaries of government schemes and ensuring they vote for the BJP. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r Around 300 call centres have already been set up, mostly at district BJP offices. These are currently being used to connect with about five million people who joined the BJP by giving a missed call and to shortlist those who want to actively contribute to the party. In the next phase, it will target the beneficiaries of government schemes. The party has planned to add 70 million more people to the beneficiary list.By the end of December or the beginning of January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch another beneficiary outreach drive. It will be concluded by February, before the real election campaign starts.The operation is coordinated by union minister Bhupender Yadav and BJP general secretary Sunil Bansal, and run by strategy consultant Diggaj Mogra’s Jarvis Consulting. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had got 220 million votes and, at the internal meetings, party national president JP Nadda has set the target for next year at 350 million, or about 60% more votes than five years earlier.Through its focus on party workers and beneficiaries of welfare schemes, the BJP changed the game in the three states where it won the assembly elections. It is going to extrapolate the winning formula across the country.In the assembly elections, the BJP worked on a three-pronged strategy:1. Communication centresThe party established 20 call centres with 50-60 agents in the three states. MP had nine of these call centres, while Rajasthan had six and Chhattisgarh five. These call centres were planned to be the convergent points between the senior leadership and local-level workers.2. Connecting missing workersThis was the most important task handed out by union home minister Amit Shah to state leaderships and communication teams, four months before the assembly elections. The BJP created separate mobile apps for the three states: Sangathan (MP), Vijay Sankalp (Rajasthan) and Sangathan Shakti (Chhattisgarh). At the national level, the BJP works on the Saral app for membership and booth-level connectivity. The state-level apps were an extension of Saral with more localised information.The idea was to create a separate platform for party workers in the states in the wake of elections.The BJP ran a campaign allowing anyone to become a party member by giving a missed call. But not all of those who join the party this way become active members. It ran a drive through the call centres in the three states to connect with such members and try to shortlist those who are willing to devote time for the party. Through this process. it added one million new active party workers in three states, with MP accounting for 450,000 .2. Leveraging the LabharthisThis was the first time the BJP strongly relied on the beneficiary, or Labharthi, voters as a success formula. Different strategies were adopted for the three states. For example, in MP, the focus was on 90 swing assembly seats. The campaign focused on a few government schemes like the PM Awas, PM Kisan and Ladli Behna. Among the 13 million Ladli Behna beneficiaries, 3.5 million came into the party system through worker networks. The calculation was that one beneficiary can influence at least 2-3 votes. In Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh where the Congress was in power, the focus was on those who had not received the benefits of the central schemes.A list of 25.0-27.5 million people who had either received the benefits of at least one scheme or have not received any was drawn in the three states.ExecutionOn voting day, from setting up counters at polling booths to ferrying the beneficiary voters, everything was updated instantly by the party workers on the app. In MP, voting by beneficiaries of the Ladli Behna scheme and female voters was slow in the first half but picked up in the afternoon. In MP, the plan was executed up to 88%, while it was 70% in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.As the final results came, the BJP increased its vote share in all the three states, adding the most in Chhattisgarh. It increased its vote share from 33% in 2018 to 46% in Chhattisgarh, where it got around 2.5 million more votes. In MP it added 5.47 million votes compared with 2018, while in Rajasthan, the increase was 2.77 million votes.