New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hit the campaign trail in poll-bound Delhi after the ongoing Republic Day celebrations end officially on Thursday with the Beating the Retreat Ceremony.
According to the schedule finalised by the central office of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Modi will address four rallies in the run up to February 7 Delhi polls by addressing a rally each in North, South, East and West Delhi.
Modi will address his first rally in East Delhi’s Shahdara area on January 31, followed by another rally in West Delhi on February 1. He will follow up it by addressing his next rally at North Delhi’s Rohini area on February 3 and conclude it by addressing his last rally in the elite South Delhi.
Modi had kick-started BJP’s campaign by addressing a modestly successful rally at Central Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan on January 10.
Just five rallies by BJP’s star campaigner has raised several questions considering the party was initially planning to seek votes on Modi’s name and had tentatively planned about a dozen rallies for him.
The BJP instead made a tactical retreat by naming former super cop Kiran Bedi as its chief ministerial candidate last week within days of her induction into the party.
Ever since Modi took over as the prime minister in May last year, BJP successfully experimented by seeking votes on Modi’s name in polls in four states. While it got majority on its own in Haryana, it is running coalition governments in Maharashtra and Jharkhand while Jammu and Kashmir is currently under Governor’s rule following a fractured mandate.
Modi’s limited involvement in Delhi polls is being seen as BJP’s reluctance to overuse Modi and get him a bad publicity if the
Delhi verdict does not go in BJP’s favour.
Contrary to earlier claims of the BJP and results of opinion polls which showed BJP was headed for a runaway victory, many within the BJP privately agree that the fight is closer than they had expected with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) fast making up for the lost political ground and giving BJP a close fight.
In place of Modi, the BJP has put the onus of heading the campaign on Kiran Bedi who is addressing about three rallies each day to ensure she covers all 70 constituencies by February 5 when campaigning ends officially. In between, BJP president Amit Shah and other senior leaders of the party are also either chipping in or are slated to address rallies, including federal ministers Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, M. Venkaiah Naidu, Nitin Gadkari, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Nirmala Sitharaman.
Modi’s January 10 rally, despite being termed in Indian media as a mega rally, was only moderately successful as fewer than 100,000 people turned up to listen to him.
An alarmed BJP has now asked its seven Delhi MPs to ensure huge gathering turn up to listen to Modi in the next four rallies in order to send positive signal to fringe voters that BJP is on course to getting the majority that eluded it in December 2013 Delhi polls when it won 32 seats in the 70-member assembly, including one seat won by its junior partner Shiromani Akali Dal.
