bjp: BJP looks at boosting prospects in south India

After winning elections in the Hindi heartland and the Northeast, the BJP is setting its eyes on South India as leaders feel this is the best time for the party to make its presence felt there.

Meetings are planned, action points are being implemented to increase the support base of the BJP in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and to a lesser extent Kerala. The party is already in power in Karnataka.

Before the RSS completes 100 years in 2025, the party aims to improve its strength in all these states, including Kerala, where efforts have met with no success. In fact, the southern migration was the game plan of the then party president Amit Shah, who worked on it during his tenure, as a result of which the party made some inroads in states like Telangana during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

BJP general secretary CT Ravi told ET, “We have won two bypolls in Telangana, while the ruling TRS has spent huge amounts of money. We are at number three in Tamil Nadu and things are looking good in Andhra as well. Ravi is also the party in-charge of Tamil Nadu. In the 2021 assembly elections, the BJP won four of the 20 seats it contested in alliance with the AIADMK. Last month’s urban local bodies elections in Tamil Nadu boosted the BJP’s confidence and the party now claims to be third in the state after DMK and AIADMK. In the urban civic polls, the BJP had won 308 out of 12,838 seats in the state. BJP had fielded its candidates on 5400 seats. Its vote share in the elections stood at 5.4 per cent.

In Andhra Pradesh, BJP has divided the state into four zones and meetings will be held in each zone from April 27 to April 30.

Originally published at Pen 18