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Focus on 12,000 swing booths: How BJP made late shifts, turned polls its way

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Winning the booth to win the election became the BJP’s mantra since Amit Shah became the party president in 2014. And Maharashtra assembly polls were no different. What differentiates Maharashtra from other states won by the BJP is the specific strategy the party adopted to turn the tide in its favour in a state where it suffered a setback just four months back.

The BJP contested 149 assembly seats and won 132 out of it clocking a strike rate of 89%, making Maharashtra the biggest ever win by the party. The BJP took this battle down to 12,000 swing polling booths out of around one lakh booths in Maharashtra, which helped it wrestle assembly seats in areas where opposition was perceived to be stronger.

Team Formation

Immediately after the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP appointed union ministers Bhupendra Yadav and Ashwini Vaishnaw as election incharge of Maharashtra. Together the two leaders delivered crucial Madhya Pradesh for the party in 2023. Apart from the two, the BJP has two in-house agencies, Varahe Analytics and Jarvis Consulting which handle the campaign strategy and data intelligence for the party.

The Election within Election

In September, union home minister Amit Shah met BJP leaders in Maharashtra. At the meeting, Shah is believed to have instructed the leaders to forget that it is an assembly election and focus on polling booths in their respective areas. Jarvis Consulting was asked to figure out the swing seats which the BJP has lost or won over the past few elections with a change in voter pattern.

Sources tell ET that the internal party survey identified 69 assembly seats as the seats which the party will win with minimum efforts. These included seats of senior party leaders like Devendra Fadnavis and Ashish Shelar. The focus was to win another 70 assembly seats to take the party’s tally beyond 125. After an intense exercise, 80 assembly seats were identified where the BJP won or lost the election with 3-4% vote swings. The maximum number of seats out of the identified 80 seats were 31 in the Vidarbha region. Once the seats were identified, the next assignment was to identify swing booths in each of the 80 assembly seats. The party has three broader categorisations of polling booths. The A category booths where the party wins in terms of votes, the B-category booths where it won or lost due to voters changing their minds and the third C-category where it never wins. The area of focus was narrowed down to the B- category booths. After the data mining 12,000 booths were identified as B-category booths which will decide whether the BJP will win or lose the Maharashtra battle.

The total booths in Maharashtra assembly elections were 1,00,186 but BJP invested heavily on these 12,000 booths.

“This was happening for the first time where we were working on an election within an election where the focus was on only 12% of the polling booths in the entire state,” said a BJP leader involved in the campaign.

Resource Mobilisation

Once the target was set, the resource mobilisation started three months before the elections in September. ET learnt that Bhupendra Yadav, Vaishnaw and Shivprakash, the national joint general secretary of the BJP, ensured that whatever the team requires be made available to them. Varahe was asked to develop special content for these 80 assembly seats focusing on regional and local issues to engage with the voters. Five call centres each with around 200 callers came up at Nagpur, Nasik, Pune, Mumbai and Thane. The 1,000 callers were given 10 to 12 booths each and were asked to keep a one-to-one conversation with the booth level workers at least twice a week on one booth.

BJP leader Sumant Ghaisas was made incharge of the call centre and booth management. Former union minister Bhagwat Karad was asked to handle the gaps at the booth level in terms of team and coordination. The daily tracking started with a target of having a proper team one month before the polling.

Focus on Women

This was the first election where BJP called women party leaders from other states in large numbers and deputed at least one woman leader in all the 80 assembly seats. Apart from that, the party appointed Mahila Vistaraks in each assembly constituency and provided them a scooty to cover all the listed booths in their assembly. Tiffin meetings with women workers and women leaders from other states were organised on a regular basis. It was ensured that women leaders from other parties in the Mahayuti should be present in the meetings and taken on board. The leaders were also given targets to meet at least 50 women beneficiaries of the Ladki Bahin scheme. As per sources, the exercise started one and half months before the polling and as polling came closer, the pravasi women leaders had developed a rapport with the ground workers as well as voters.

Efforts among OBCs

One week before Diwali, Bhupendra Yadav is learnt to have called a meeting of OBC leaders and influencers of different castes at the residence of Devendra Fadnavis in Mumbai, discussing and resolving their issues with the government as well as the party. Sources tell ET that throughout the campaign, Yadav was personally managing the OBC community across Maharashtra with a focus on the 80 seats. He travelled in all the zones and attended zonal meetings targeted at the OBC community. In Marathwada, the ground feedback from a few seats was that if Pankaja Munde campaigns on the seats, the party can turn a section of voters. ET learnt that Yadav provided a special helicopter to Munde for four days and she was asked to go wherever she wanted in the area. The helicopter made 16 to 17 landings in a day and the finance department raised the budget issue. But Yadav backed Munde strongly. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Mohan Yadav and Chhattisgarh deputy CM Arun Sao also campaigned in the areas with high concentration of OBC votes.

Tribal Turnout

With 24 ST reserved assembly seats in the state, tribal voter support was a crucial factor for BJP’s success in the election. During the Lok Sabha polls, the party’s performance was poor in tribal areas. To bring the tribal to the party fold, the party deployed Nishant Khare, an old RSS ideologue working among tribals in MP with a clear goal of improving the party’s performance on ST reserved seats as well as 25 other assembly seats where tribal voters are around 25%. Khare has worked for the party in Madhya Pradesh and other states during Covid and assembly as well as Lok Sabha elections. Sources tell ET that Khare built a team of PESA volunteers who were willing to work for the party during elections. Around 500 volunteers came up to work for the party and they were trained to work in their respective areas. Last four days before the election, 40-50 volunteers were provided bikes with petrol to visit all the tribal areas and prepare the voters for the voting day. On the voting day, they were tasked with five votes each apart from their family members on their booths. The bikers brought the tribal from areas with no roads to the polling stations and this helped increase the voting percentage. Out of 24 ST reserved assembly seats the NDA won 21 seats with BJP winning 10, Shiv Sena winning six and NCP winning five seats. Out of 25 other seats where tribal population was 25% or more, the NDA won all the 25 seats.

With the three-month exercise, the BJP was able to increase votes by almost 5% in these constituencies. Out of the 69 assembly seats which the party was sure of winning, it won 64 seats. Out of the 80 seats comprising 12,000 swing booths, the BJP won 68 seats taking the total tally to 132, the highest for the party in the state.

While campaign strategists for Shiv Sena and the NCP were quite vocal about the success of their parties, several leaders as well as agencies working for the BJP were reluctant to come on the record in the story.

“For other agencies, the party is their client, and they treat it as an assignment. In our case, we are the extended arm of the party, and it is our primary duty to execute what we are tasked with,” Diggaj Mogra of Jarvis Consulting, told ET.

Bhupendra Yadav is back in Delhi executing his ministerial work. The BJP election machinery quietly left the state and has started working on forthcoming elections.

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