Bhubaneswar: Soon after his arrival in the Temple City Sunday, BJP president Amit Shah held a series of closed-door meetings with the party’s state leaders to fine-tune poll strategies, a senior leader said.
Shah has set a target for the party to win at least 120 of the 147 Assembly seats in Odisha in the 2019 election.
Senior saffron leaders, including Union ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and Jual Oram and the party’s state unit chief Basant Panda, accorded a warm welcome to Shah on his arrival at the Biju Patnaik International Airport.
Shah’s visit has “spurred enthusiasm” among the party workers, who are gearing up to cross swords with the ruling BJD, which has been in power in Odisha since 2000, senior BJP leader Pratap Sarangi said. With less than a year left for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Shah’s visit assumes significance.
“The visit is more significant as the BJP president has set a target for the party to win at least 120 out of the 147 seats in the next Assembly polls. We are working wholeheartedly to translate his dream into reality,” he said.
During his day-long visit here, Shah not only reviewed the party’s organizational activities, but also tweaked its election strategies with inputs from senior state leaders.
During his discussion with state party leaders and office-bearers, Shah reviewed the benefits doled out under various central schemes. He also ascertained whether any Central scheme is yet to reach the grassroots level in Odisha, the leader said.
As part of his brain-storming sessions, Shah held a meeting with two leaders from each of the panchayats in the 21 Assembly segments under the Bhubaneswar, Puri and Cuttack Lok Sabha constituencies.
Shah, who had last year launched a booth contact programme — ‘Mo Booth Sabuthu Majbhoot’ (My booth is the strongest one) — in Odisha, assigned the state party leaders with the task of ensuring door-to-door visit by booth workers to inform people about the pro-poor initiatives and welfare measures undertaken by the BJP-led NDA government.
His Odisha visit, which is seen as a part of the party’s ‘look east’ policy, comes in the midst of a war of words between his party and the ruling BJD over the state government’s rejection of the Centre’s Ayushman Bharat scheme.
According to another BJP leader, Shah is trying to galvanise the organisational structure of the party ahead of the 2019 elections. “That the BJP has identified Odisha as a “focus” state is clear from the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose Cuttack to address his government’s anniversary rally May 26,” he said.
Of the 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha, the BJP was able to bag just one in the 2014 general elections, while the remaining were won by the BJD.
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