Day-long deliberations and marathon meetings led by BJP National General Secretary (Organisation) BL Santhosh over the Rajasthan urban local body polls underscored the attention the party’s central leadership is paying to an election that would ordinarily be left largely to the state unit.
Even by the BJP’s standards, this is an unusually heavy central presence for a local election.”The BJP is an elephant, and the elephant keeps walking,” quipped Radha Mohan Das Agarwal, a national general secretary of the party who is a Rajya Sabha member from UP and the state unit organisational in-charge for Rajasthan. Asked why the party was monitoring the Rajasthan local polls so closely, he said, “We take every election seriously.”
Party insiders suggest there is more at stake than municipal victories. With the urban local body polls and panchayat elections coming in quick succession, the BJP is expected to look beyond the immediate electoral results. The campaign and the eventual outcome could offer the party an important reading of cadre morale, local caste equations, youth sentiment and, crucially, the political fallout of the Jantar Mantar protest by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). For a party trying to gauge whether a movement that found resonance among younger voters has translated into a wider political shift, the Rajasthan municipal elections offer a relatively early and measurable test. The intensity of the exercise was perhaps best reflected in the last meeting of the day. Lasting more than two-and-a-half hours, it was a closely guarded meeting between Santhosh, Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma, state BJP president Madan Rathore, Rajasthan in-charge Radha Mohan Das Agarwal, election observer Harish Dwivedi and the newly appointed state general secretary (organisation), Ajey Kumar. The composition of the meeting brought together virtually the entire chain of the party’s organisational and political leadership in Rajasthan.
Of the more than 1.4 crore voters across the 309 urban centres going to the polls, around 26 per cent are young voters.
