Home Minister Amit Shah arrives to attend Maharashtra BJP core group meeting at party headquarters in New Delhi.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: Buoyed by the unexpected success in Haryana, the BJP has started work to strategise in poll-bound Maharashtra.
The party’s leadership got in a huddle on Monday with the state’s core committee to discuss tickets and seat distribution in Maharashtra.
President JP Nadda, union minister Amit Shah, Maharashtra deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis, general secretary Vinod Tawde, union ministers Piyush Goyal and Ashwini Vaishnaw, as well as Pankaja Munde were among those present.
The discussion was held ahead of the meeting of BJP’s Central Election Committee which is set to meet on Wednesday. After the meeting was over, Maharashtra unit president Chandrashekhar Bawankule told reporters that they discussed the seats where the BJP has sitting MLAs.
“Right now, we have decided that tickets will be shared among the Mahayuti Alliance on the basis of winnability, the priority is to ensure that parties with sitting legislators get those seats. The ones where we do not have any alliance MLAs will be further discussed,” Bawankule said.
The BJP has 102 MLAs, and about 7 alliance partners, in addition to 14 independents as part of the Mahayuti Alliance. A key poll strategist of the party said that in Monday’s meeting, on priority were 80 odd seats which were first discussed in the meeting which stretched for more than four hours.
“Apart from that, we also discussed all the sitting seats that belong to the BJP, as well as some more seats where we feel the party can do good,” the leader said.
The leader also added that a significant chunk of the sitting MLAs might not get tickets. “It is par for the course in BJP that all tickets are not repeated, typically 40 per cent lose elections. So we will have fresh faces this time, too,” the leader said.
Sources attending the meeting also said that the caste census came up for discussions in the meeting. The BJP is exploring the possibility of the caste census, with the party’s top leadership not saying anything contrary to it till now.
DH has earlier reported that the party intends to keep 160-170 for itself, setting aside around 70 to Shiv Sena (Eknath faction). Apart from that, over 5-7 seats could be given to Ramdas Athawale, leaving aside the rest for the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar faction).
The alliance partners have been demanding more seats – the NCP has publicly demanded 60-70 seats, while Athawale has gone on record asking for 10-15 seats.