Booth-level managementfetches BJP historic win

Mumbai: While registering an unprecedented victory and bettering its own past record, the BJP won 132 seats in 2024 Maharashtra Assembly election leaving everybody to wonder about the reasons behind such resounding victory. It is now turning out that the BJP’s micromanagement at the booth level after the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year has won it majority of its seats.

If party workers are to be believed, as many as 126 out of 132 seats were won because of the micro management.

After the debacle in Lok Sabha election in the Month of May, Maharashtra in-charge of BJP Bhupendra Yadav did a quick data crunching and came up with a list of 13,000 booths spread across 130 assembly constituencies, where, he said, startling results can be achieved with minimal efforts and that too within a short time span. Accordingly, by the end of June, 130 young, enthusiastic, tech-savvy, well-educated young men and women who had deep ideological roots in Hindutva were identified and deployed in 130 constituencies across the state. A complete feedback and monitoring system from the state centre to the level of each of these 130 constituencies too was quickly put in place. BJP Konkan regional organizing secretary Shailendra Dalvi was given responsibility of this plan which was named ‘Vistarak Yojana’.

Under this scheme, along with the one chosen tech-savvy young person, who is called Vistarak – one who spreads the party, a team of at least 4 other individuals too was roped in. They included an MLA or a minister or a senior party functionary from other state – who was identified as Vidhansabha Sathi, a local RSS office-bearer who looked after coordination of the team and two individuals from Anulom and Varahi – the agencies that have been formed to take state and central government schemes to the last individual. This team of five individuals was given a single-focus task to energise and vitalize the booth-level party apparatus. They almost never participated in any of the election rallies and hardly met Netas who were campaigning. Most of them also had minimal contact with the candidates and their teams that were engaged in various aspects of campaign management. In a way these 130 teams of five individuals worked like the bureaucratic framework.

These teams were provided with all the data they needed like the number of government scheme beneficiaries in each of the booth areas, past and present members of the BJP and the ideological family etc. The team members were given particular tasks for every day and the data gathered by them throughout the day was collected at the state centre and was further processed to assess the developments on those boots. The teams were also immediately given instructions if they needed to change focus or strategy in case of certain unexpected events. This kind of live and organic connect between all the teams helped them better their performance over the five months that they stayed in the concerned assemblies.

As they say, the devil is in details, senior editor and former Rajya Sabha member of the Congress, while analysing the reasons behind the devastating defeat of the Congress and the alliance it led, said, “While the Congress and MVA worked on Macro level, the Mahayuti toiled at the micro level. Dealing with individual level has become important in the changing world of electioneering today. The Shiv Sena had that advantage of direct people’s connect. However, that was lost by Uddhav Thackeray, while Eknath Shinde built on this natural advantage that he has inherited from the past leaders of the party.”