| |
| |
By Category |
 |
|
|
| |
|
| |
| |
India On Media |
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| Politics
News |
|
| Behind The BJP's UP Election Machin |
| Behind The BJP's UP Election Machine, Meet The Party's Mini-Amit Shah
|
| INDIA
, 2-March-2017
21:3:34 PM |
| likely to remain invisible - Sunil Bansal, the party's organisation secretary, and the man to whom BJP chief Amit Shah entrusted the UP campaign.
Clad in a light pink kurta, Sunil-ji, as he is known, met us at the BJP headquarters in Benares, the party's nerve centre for the final phase of the elections.
Even before UP, Mr Bansal, who has his roots in the ABVP, a BJP-linked student body, had played an equally low key role as Mr Shah's apprentice for the BJP's enormously successful 2014 Lok Sabha campaign. The BJP had won a record 71 of UP's 80 Lok Sabha seats.
It is here, he told us, that he maintained a nightly diary on Mr Shah's style of election management, and it is to this diary he turned when he was handed the 2017 UP campaign. (The other BJP in charge of UP is its Rajya Sabha MP, Om Mathur, who also, like Mr Bansal, is from Rajasthan).
Mr Bansal says he noticed three key weaknesses that he sought to fix - one, to remedy the party's poor rural outreach, the BJP fought panchayat elections in UP in 2015, with a far greater intensity than before, contesting around 3000 seats. It only won about 350, but the exercise impelled it to create a village-level talent pool that would prove invaluable.
|
|
|
|
|
|
