Amit Shah brings out agenda for  2019 Lok Sabha election

BJP president Amit Shah exhorted party office-bearers to have “single-minded focus on the 2019 polls”, terming the party’s loss in the Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, as “not a defeat of the BJP” despite the Congress having won.

The reference was to the closely fought battle in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where the BJP managed to keep the Congress shy of the halfway mark. Without losing time, barely two days after losing his post as Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, has been roped in by Mr. Shah to be extensively deployed for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Mr. Chouhan would be the star speaker at a public rally planned at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan on February 16.

At an organisational meeting of all central office-bearers as well as organisational general secretaries of State units, Mr. Shah laid out an extensive programme to kick-start preparations for the 2019 polls. Party general secretary Bhupendra Yadav said the party would hold a meeting of its national council in New Delhi on January 11 and 12.

“In our organisational set up we have seven morchas or cells and they will also be involved in poll preparedness,” Mr Yadav said.

The first in a series of morcha-level meetings will be the national executive of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (youth wing of the BJP) on December 15 and 16 in New Delhi to be addressed by  Mr. Shah.

The Scheduled Caste morcha will meet in Nagpur between January 19 and 20. Office-bearers from the district level upwards will attend the meeting to be addressed by Mr. Shah and Union Ministers Nitin Gadkari and Thawarchand Gehlot.

The series of meetings programmes across the country will end with a meeting of the Kisan Morcha (farmers cell) on February 21 and 22, which will be addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.