In Haryana, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has already reversed one election strategy of announcing the candidate list before the Election Commission declares poll dates — a trend seen in the Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh assembly elections last year. Now, sources in BJP suggest that the party is likely to change another poll scheme that it used widely in these three state polls.
The BJP’s first candidate list, which is expected on August 26, is likely to be of seats that the party is most confident about, sources said. This is a complete reversal of the strategy the BJP employed in last year’s assembly election where it went for the weakest seats first.
The party’s logic was that an early announcement of a candidate list from its weakest seats would give the BJP candidates ample time and room to be ahead of competitors. The party had named 21 candidates for Chhattisgarh, which has 90 assembly seats, and 39 for Madhya Pradesh which has 230 members in the state assembly, in its first go.
But come August 25, when the BJP has convened its central election committee meeting to decide on Haryana and J&K’s first list, the BJP will focus on seats in Haryana where it has consistently performed well.
The party has already constituted a 14-member manifesto committee which is headed by national secretary Om Prakash Dhankar. Dhankar also headed the manifesto committee in 2019. This committee, which has members like former ministers Captain Abhimanyu, Vipul Goyal, and Kiran Choudhry among others, is tipped to present the BJP manifesto on the lines of ‘non-stop Haryana’.
Ahead of the August 25 CEC meeting, which will be attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party president JP Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah among others, the Haryana state election committee met in Gurugram on Thursday to brainstorm over the draft of the first list. All 21 members of the committee, including chief minister Nayab Singh Saini and former CM Manohar Lal Khattar, were in attendance.
The meeting will continue till Friday after which a draft first list will be made, with three options for each constituency. The CEC will eventually pick the candidates on August 25.
After a ten-year tenure, the BJP faces an uphill task this assembly election with Jat consolidation expected to gravitate towards the Congress en-masse and the baggage of anti-incumbency — something that forced it to replace Manohar Lal Khattar with Nayab Singh Saini as Haryana’s chief minister in March this year. After its tally was halved in the Lok Sabha election in Haryana in comparison to the 2019 result, the BJP seems to have set its eye on securing its strong seats first instead of eyeing the tough ones.
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