Amit Shah, Vasundhara Raje share stage in Rajasthan, call for worker unity

BJP national president Amit Shah was in Jaipur to launch the preparations for the upcoming 2019 Lok Sabha polls. He spelled out the strategy of putting party workers at the helm of the campaign.

The strategy spelled out by Shah is similar to the one adopted by the BJP in the recently held Assembly polls in the state. Here too the onus of ensuring every voter reaches polling booth was on the organisation. Shah also said that the party’s strategy was to reach out to every beneficiary of the Modi and Raje government schemes. He told workers to actively participate in all party activities so that connect is established with every voter. While the strategies are similar, during the Assembly election, the efforts fell short and BJP suffered a defeat by a miniscule margin.

Going into the statistics of BJP’s defeat in the state, Shah said the vote difference was mere 0.5% and thus it was not a defeat. During his address Shah praised also the previous Raje government and said that the work done during Raje’s tenure was unparalleled.

This was the first public platform that Shah and Raje shared after the Assembly polls. While Shah praised, on more than one occasion, the works done by Raje government, the entire focus on strategy for forthcoming polls was on outreach by party cadre.

He called upon the workers to win each of the 25 seats as had been done in 2014 adding that it was very vital for the party.

“Work with passion and work with micro planning,” said Shah to the party workers.

That the relation between Shah and Raje are strained is no secret; she has been assigned campaign duties in states other than Rajasthan.

Shah on his day long tour was also scheduled to address meetings of party workers and state core committee. However he left for Mumbai in the afternoon right after the Shakti Sammelan to finalise the seat sharing between BJP and Shiv Sena.

This once again raises the question, would this work out as the organisation is just like that time, manned by the same functionaries that had been appointed during the tenure of Raje loyalist former state chief Ashok Parnami.

Shah, during his address in Jaipur on Monday, also invoked the strong ties that the BJP shares with Rajasthan. He mentioned names of Sundar Singh Bhandari, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, and LK Advani who he said had set up the foundation of the party in Rajasthan.