Lok Sabha elections 2024: How the BJP plans to achieve 'Mission 370'

New Delhi: A well-oiled electoral machinery, the BJP almost two years ago started working on its ambitious target of winning 370 out of the 543 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

Insiders say the ‘Mission 370’, which many political analysts believe difficult to achieve, started in 2022 with the party earmarking 144 seats where it had either lost or not contested in 2019. The leadership later revised this number to 160. It is the performance in these seats that will decide whether the party achieves the target.

Credit: DH Graphic

Since it ascended to power in 2014, the saffron party has continuously set higher electoral targets for itself. The party bagged 282 seats in 2014, and by 2019, it added 21 seats to the tally to win 303 seats.

To work on the target of 370 seats for itself, and 400 seats for the National Democratic Alliance, the BJP had to look at the only such instance — the 1984 Lok Sabha elections when the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership won 403 seats.

Sources privy to the strategy say the BJP first looked at the seats where it had won with more than 50 per cent vote share. In 2019, this number stood at 224 seats, an increase from the 136 seats it had won with more than 50 per cent vote share in 2014. The BJP’s 2019 tally is only second to the 1984 results achieved by the Congress which had managed to win 293 seats with more than 50 per cent vote share.

“Of the 403 seats they had won then (in 1984), the vote share in 293 seats was above 50 per cent. We already have 50 per cent vote share in 224 seats, so our task is cut — we need to work on 69 more seats,” says a senior party strategist.

The party’s focus now, according to those involved, is to win at least 50 per cent of the 160 seats it had earmarked a year and a half ago as “weak”. After these seats were identified, the party has carried out a host of activities – booth strengthening exercises, Lok Sabha Pravas of key leaders and ministers in its seats and plans to have rallies by either PM Narendra Modi, party president JP Nadda, home minister Amit Shah, and defence minister Rajnath Singh in these seats are being chalked out.

Several seats in Odisha, West Bengal and Punjab are the focus of the strategy. In addition, seats in Punjab and in the south – especially in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh – are part of the efforts.

The saffron party’s performance in states such as Maharashtra, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh as well as in Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh in the Northeast has been consistently good. The party had won 194 of the 203 seats that it had contested among the 251 seats in these states in 2019.

In the South Indian states including Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry (UT), Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, as well as in J&K and Punjab, the BJP’s tally in 2019 was a bleak 5 out of the 103 total seats, of which it had contested in 53.

It is in states such as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Telangana and Odisha, and in the Northeast that the BJP has a real chance of increasing its tally.

In these states, barring the NE states, the BJP won 101 seats of the 168 seats it contested of the total 174 seats.

In the four NE states barring Assam, it won only 1 seat out of the 6 it had contested. However, the saffron party has entered into alliances this year with regional parties in the Northeast, which is likely to bump up the NDA’s tally.

Sanjay Kumar, co-director of the Lokniti Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, says it is next to impossible for the BJP to cobble up the numbers that it has set its sights on.

“In my opinion, it is impossible. And if the BJP cannot cross 370, the NDA will find it hard to cross 400. The NDA now needs 59 more seats to cross the 400 mark, and for the BJP there is a scope of winning a maximum 30-35 seats. In the best case scenario, the BJP can get a maximum of 340 seats, which is tough,” Kumar says.

He says that in the South, in the best case scenario, the BJP can double its tally in Telangana (from 4 seats to 8), increase 2-3 seats in Andhra and gain a handful from Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Additionally, he says, in UP, West Bengal and Odisha, the tally has the possibility of increasing by 20-25 seats.