Look beyond 2017, Amit Shah tells U’khand BJP

Neena Sharma

Tribune News Service

Dehradun, May 4

With the wave of a hand an impatient BJP national president Amit Shah, during his address to the party workers yesterday, had deflated the BJP national general secretary Ram Lal who had spoken ahead of him, about BJP storming back to power in the 2017 Assembly elections, going by the nature of the electorate of Uttarakhand not to repeat the party in power again.

Instead, Amit Shah jolted the party from it’s complacency, urging the members to look beyond 2017, so that the BJP extends its appeal in Uttarakhand beyond the five-year term.

For that matter, BJP party leaders say, to achieve the objective, Amit Shah during his meeting with the senior Uttarakhand party leaders, has indicated a tectonic shift in the party in the coming days for which a strategy has already been chalked out. “The state units will function according to a strategy and design crafted by Amit Shah and his team members. The complete details of each and every member of the BJP will be fed in the computers.His strategy is to strengthen the party apparatus as much as possible before the 2017 polls,” said Manohar Kant Dhyani, a senior BJP leader.

A North Indian state with overwhelming presence of important pilgrimages, the BJP has never found it difficult to subsume these aspects of the state within it’s larger Hindutva agenda. But the dividend in the form of an unbroken stint for the BJP government in the state has never come by mainly due to lack of leadership and unending factionalism in the state BJP.

Added to that is the limited political space in the state for the regional parties, where the electorate has been happily making a choice between the two. The BJP wants to break the jinx by becoming the natural choice of the voters for a prolonged rule in the state.

So if Shah is thinking beyond 2017, he is not wrong. It also sits well with the BJP’s strategy as a whole. It would be interesting to see how far Amit Shah would go to achieve his goal, even changing the national leaders such as Ram Lal and others, whose involvement in the state politics has continued for the last 12 years.