When it comes to setting goals and working towards them, nobody does it better than the BJP. Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh may be more than a year and a half away, but the state unit is ensuring that 2023 is not a repeat of 2018. In that election, the saffron party’s 41.02 per cent vote share proved insufficient to make it the single largest party. In the 230-member assembly, the Congress, with a marginally lower vote share of 40.89 per cent, won 114 seats – five more than the BJP’s 109 – and went on to form the government. Jyotiraditya Scindia’s rebellion in March 2020 and joining the BJP with 22 MLAs marked the return of Shivraj Singh Chouhan as Chief Minister. Nevertheless, a gap of two years after 15 years has put a question mark on the electoral dominance of the saffron party in the state. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, the BJP has turned to a booth-based statistical model to increase its vote share by 10 per cent in 2023. Hence mission 51.
Party leaders know it will not be easy. The plan involves the use of digital technology to share data from the booth level – the most important unit – to the party headquarters in Bhopal and vice versa. With over 64,000 polling stations in the state, it is a colossal task. The information from the booth is shared through the organization, a mobile app specially developed for this purpose. It is also used to monitor the work of the booth level team. While workers used to fill in data from their homes earlier, the app’s geofencing feature creates a virtual geographic boundary around the booth area and allows data to be uploaded only when they are inside it. The updated data can be viewed on a dashboard in the Technical Cell at Bhopal Headquarters.
The scheme was implemented in November 2021, with around 21,000 vistaraks across the state for setting up booth-level bodies. Each booth level body, called ‘tridev’ in party parlance, consists of a president, a general secretary and an agent.
According to State BJP President and Lok Sabha MP VD Sharma, the work of the party has been digitized in about 94 percent of the booths due to this scheme. “It helps in effective monitoring of party work up to the booth level. A similar approach had helped the party immensely in the Gujarat civic polls last year,” says Sharma.
The scheme involves booth-level teams, which focus on voters in their respective booths and classify them into three categories: those who oppose the BJP; Beneficiaries of various schemes launched by BJP governments in the state and at the Centre; And influential people who did not vote for BJP but could be brought in favor of the party.
To ensure that booth level workers are on the job, a training exercise will be conducted in all 1,020 mandals of the state. In order to get beneficiaries of government schemes to vote for the BJP, workers have been asked to directly associate what they have been given – eg, a house under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, or free rations. With the party in power. The meeting of Ladli Laxmi Sammelan and Ayushman Yojana with the beneficiaries of these schemes is to be held at the booth level so that the workers can go door to door. In addition, to enable regular interaction with voters, activists will organize celebrations on the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Deen Dayal Upadhyay and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Graphic by Asit Roy
The party has identified tribals and SCs as groups that can help increase the vote share to 51 per cent. While there has been a clear plan to woo the tribals—the President, the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister visited the state for a tribal festival, towns and facilities were named after tribal symbols, and tribal-specific schemes were introduced. Announced – The party began focusing on SCs after the recent by-polls in which it lost the SC-reserved Raigaon seat to Congress. “We had occupied that seat earlier, but the SC voters walked away from us. A clear message has been sent to the workers to work among the community,” says a party functionary involved in the scheme. The state unit of the party has decided to develop Scheduled Caste leaders at the local level to reach out to the community.
While party leaders are confident of overcoming the expected surge in vote share, challenges remain. During monitoring, Bhopal officials are still getting such booths where the data being uploaded on the organization is not correct. The success of the scheme also depends on the fact that apart from the BJP and the Congress, other parties are also not getting enough votes. Buoyed by Punjab’s victory, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will also make inroads in Madhya Pradesh, and it is not clear whether it will be the BJP’s or the Congress’s vote that will be cut by AAP or any other party. Meanwhile, the Congress has also revealed plans to strengthen the party at the booth and mandal level. What seems inevitable is that the big fight will end, which dominates the electoral landscape at the level of its core building block—the polling booth.