Shared News | August 13, 2018 15:57 IST
With general election 2019 in mind, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now decided to focus on the Dalit community in Uttar Pradesh.
The decision came two months after the BJP lost the Kairana bypolls and Noorpur Assembly seats in May.
The state unit of the party held a two-day executive meeting in Meerut from August 11 to chalk out a plan for the 2019 general election. The meeting was held at Subharti University and the programme area was strategically named ‘Matadeen Valmiki Karyakram Sthal’ after a Dalit freedom fighter. Matadeen Valmiki was a local freedom fighter who participated in the Meerut Revolution 1857 with Mangal Panday.
The BJP was able to get the support of the Valmiki community, a prominent Dalit section in western UP, in both the 2014 general election and the 2017 assembly election. But the party lost a mayoral poll in Meerut in December last year to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate from the Valmiki community.
Considering this, the BJP chief Amit Shah, who was present at the closing ceremony of the state executive meeting, instructed the party leaders to reach out to the Dalit and OBC community. The BJP decided to put at least 20 Dalit and OBC workers in each of 1.4 lakhs booths of the state.
Posters of writer and politician Vinayak Damodar Sawarker, who coined the term Hindutva, was also seen at the meeting place which suggests that the party may also play Hindu card during elections.
Apart from this, the BJP will also focus on the agenda of development. The party’s state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak said, “During the next six months, BJP will organise executive meeting in every district and advertise the work done by Narendra Modi at the Centre and Yogi Adityanath in the state.”
