With Parliament session over, BJP is back to preparing for the upcoming assembly elections.
Elections for the Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand assemblies are scheduled to take place later this year. BJP currently has a coalition government in Maharashtra and is ruling Haryana on its own. In Jharkhand, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-Congress alliance is in power.
The party has appointed election in-charges and a preliminary meeting on poll preparations has already taken place for these states.
BJP is planning to announce the first list of assembly candidates later this month for all three states, people in the know told ET. It is working on announcing 30-35 candidates for Maharashtra, around 20 for Haryana and 25 for Jharkhand.
The first list will consist of seats which BJP lost in the previous election or it won with a small margin. It could also include some constituencies reserved for the SC and ST communities. During the Lok Sabha elections, a sizable portion of SC votes shifted towards the INDIA alliance. By announcing early tickets, the party wants to give ample time to candidates to tide over the opposition faced by the party from the SC community.
The party would not have any issues in announcing tickets in Haryana and Jharkhand as it would contest most of the seats there. But for Maharashtra, it will have to take alliance partners Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar-led NCP into confidence.
As per sources, BJP central election committee will meet after August 15, where the first list of candidates will be finalised. BJP adopted this strategy of early announcement of candidates on seats the party lost during the assembly polls of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh last year. The strategy paid off as the party won a good number of seats it had lost in 2018 and currently has its governments in the three states.
