Uttar Pradesh election results: How BJP chief Amit Shah crafted a winning strategy for PM Modi
After winning Uttar Pradesh in Lok Sabha elections in 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national President Amit Shah has once again proved that he is an unparalleled engineer of electoral strategies. The wave that led the BJP to sweep in Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections was carefully crafted by Shah over a long period of time when he camped at the Lucknow head office of the party and traversed the state for months, even landing in small towns in his chopper.
Shah has learnt from his successful experiment on the last Lok Sabha elections that the caste equations can work in the BJP's favour if it is able to weave together the caste groups that don't get proper representation in Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
His biggest advantage was Prime Minister Narendra Modi's own background of other backward caste.
The BJP had successfully used this strategy when it formed governments in the state in the 90s under Kalayan Singh. Shah knew from history that the BJP could break the caste strangleholds of other parties.
Shah put together a new voter base of non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits against Samajwadi Party's Yadav vote bank and Bahujan Samajwadi Party's Jatav vote bank. He inducted in the BJP many disgruntled Dalit leaders from the BSP such as Babu Singh Kushwaha, Badshah Singh, Daddan Mishra and Awadhesh Kumar Verma. These leaders not only brought their followers to the BJP but also helped turned the Dalit sentiment in favour of the party.
Another winning tactic of Shah was an extreme campaign where Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself addressed scores of rallies. More than a dozen central ministers were also campaigning. Shah planned parallel raodshows and rallies with the SP-Congress so that they are not able to sway the voter mood anywhere. Shah held a three-hour long roadshow in Allahabad exactly when Akhilesh and Rahul Gandhi were holding one, but on an adjoining route. He planned a similar roadshow in Varanasi for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He did not let combat fatigue bring him down in an election spread over nearly two months.
Shah knew that there can't be one election plank for the entire state so he planned different planks for each phase of elections, raising issues that were relevant to the particular region going to polls. For example, the controversial 'shamshan-kabaristan' speech by Narendra Modi, which raised a communal issue was made only after the initial phases when a large number of Muslim-majority seats had already gone to polls where communal issues raised prominently by Modi could have consolidated Muslim votes for either SP or BSP.
Shah has learnt from his successful experiment on the last Lok Sabha elections that the caste equations can work in the BJP's favour if it is able to weave together the caste groups that don't get proper representation in Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
His biggest advantage was Prime Minister Narendra Modi's own background of other backward caste.
The BJP had successfully used this strategy when it formed governments in the state in the 90s under Kalayan Singh. Shah knew from history that the BJP could break the caste strangleholds of other parties.
Shah put together a new voter base of non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits against Samajwadi Party's Yadav vote bank and Bahujan Samajwadi Party's Jatav vote bank. He inducted in the BJP many disgruntled Dalit leaders from the BSP such as Babu Singh Kushwaha, Badshah Singh, Daddan Mishra and Awadhesh Kumar Verma. These leaders not only brought their followers to the BJP but also helped turned the Dalit sentiment in favour of the party.
Another winning tactic of Shah was an extreme campaign where Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself addressed scores of rallies. More than a dozen central ministers were also campaigning. Shah planned parallel raodshows and rallies with the SP-Congress so that they are not able to sway the voter mood anywhere. Shah held a three-hour long roadshow in Allahabad exactly when Akhilesh and Rahul Gandhi were holding one, but on an adjoining route. He planned a similar roadshow in Varanasi for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He did not let combat fatigue bring him down in an election spread over nearly two months.
Shah knew that there can't be one election plank for the entire state so he planned different planks for each phase of elections, raising issues that were relevant to the particular region going to polls. For example, the controversial 'shamshan-kabaristan' speech by Narendra Modi, which raised a communal issue was made only after the initial phases when a large number of Muslim-majority seats had already gone to polls where communal issues raised prominently by Modi could have consolidated Muslim votes for either SP or BSP.
