BJP delays campaign as Amit Shah busy

New Delhi: Lack of proper planning has forced Delhi BJP to postpone its start of poll campaign for the upcoming civic polls by almost two weeks. Delhi BJP had decided to organise a meeting of booth level workers on March 5 to be addressed by the party president Amit Shah but postponed it to March 19 due to his non-availability.

To strengthen party organisational structure ahead of the municipal polls, the Delhi BJP has decided to appoint five people, including a woman worker, from each booth. There are 13,372 booths in the three corporations. Mr Shah and other senior party functionaries are supposed to discuss micromanagement of booths and voters’ mobilisation on the polling day at the meeting on March 5.

A party insider said that the initiative has failed to be realised on ground as the party failed to find around 67,000 active members which also includes 13,000 active women workers. “Party key office bearers, who are managing the day to day affairs of the party in the absence of state unit president Manoj Tiwari, have failed to execute the things on the ground. Due to lack of proper execution, even the list of five workers in each booth is not ready,” he added.

Mr Tiwari is also busy in seeking votes for BJP candidates in the Assembly polls in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.

In the absence of Mr Tiwari, sources said that it was the responsibility of the state general secretaries, Kuljeet Chahal, Ravinder Gupta, and Rajesh Bhatia, to execute the party’s decision on ground in co-ordination with the general secretary of the organisation, Sidharthan.

“All the four key functionaries failed to perform their duties in the absence of Mr Tiwari. Now the state unit is citing Mr Amit Shah’s active role in Uttar Pradesh for postponement of the programme which is supposed to kick start the poll campaign for the three municipal polls. Everyone in the party knows that Mr Shah is busy in managing the party affairs in Uttar Pradesh and he will be available only after polling is over there on March 8. Despite that, they fixed the date of meeting on March 5. Now, after knowing that the homework is not complete, they are citing Mr Shah’s non-availability as the reason for postponement of the meet to March 19,” he said.