BHOPAL: The BJP’s central leadership, which has taken full control of the Assembly poll campaigning in Madhya Pradesh, is set to test a well-strategised political ‘cluster bombing’ operation to retain power in the state. For executing its plan ahead of the elections, the party’s central leadership is deploying as many as 230 legislators from neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, as well as from Bihar. Each legislator will be deployed in one particular assembly constituency of Madhya Pradesh to execute the task assigned by the party high command.
All these 230 BJP legislators reached the state capital Bhopal on Saturday and for the next 24 hours, they will be made familiar with the particular assembly constituency to which they have been assigned. Subsequently, they will move to the respective constituencies to execute the task assigned to them by the party’s Central Election Committee (CEC) and for the next one week, they all will be meeting with local party leaders, workers as well as people to prepare a detailed “report card” of each of the 230 Assembly seats in the state.
Khajuraho Lok Sabha MP and state BJP president V.D. Sharma briefing the media on Saturday said: “Deployment of 230 MLAs from four states is a part of the BJP’s new strategy and all these legislators will utilise their experiences for the next seven days to execute the plan. Our central leadership and the sangthan (organisation) have made an elaborate plan for it. We all believe that our efforts will be fruitful in view of assembly elections.”
A Delhi-based senior journalist says that the central BJP leadership has come out with ‘political cluster bombing’, knowing that the anti-incumbency, internal rifts and face-fatigue of state’s longest-serving Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan upto some extent is giving an edge to the Congress. “Deploying MLAs from outside could be the first step of the BJP and it will proceed step by step on the basis of inputs received from each of the constituencies. The role of each MLA deployed in a particular constituency will be well-defined,” he adds.
“These 230 MLAs will be meeting influential people from different sections. They are also likely to prepare a report card on caste equation, resilience within the area, and would seek people’s opinion about local leaders,” the journalist tells IANS. He further says that on the basis of the information collected by these 230 MLAs, the party will plan its next step.
“They (MLAs) are likely to dig deep to understand the issues in the particular constituency as their reports will be crucial to frame further strategy. And in this entire process, the booth-level workers are going to play crucial roles. It is completely a war-like situation where a platoon is deployed at a particular region with a particular mission and fully commanded by the top leadership, which is why the plan is called political cluster bombing,” he asserts.
In 2018, the BJP lost the Assembly elections as it had secured only 109 seats against Congress’ 114. The grand old party led by Kamal Nath had formed the government with the support of independent MLAs, however, a political crisis broke within the party and a faction led by Jyotiraditya Scindia (now Union Minister from BJP) shifted to the BJP in March 2020, throwing the Congress out of the power.
