After Maghar, Modi to attend rallies in many UP districts

LUCKNOW: Friday’s rally by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Maghar will be followed by another in Azamgarh possibly in mid-July.

At least half a dozen more Modi rallies, mostly in Purvanchal are also being planned simultaneously for a high-pitched build-up to 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

“It would virtually be one Modi rally each month. In the last Lok Sabha elections while BJP had won 71, its ally Apna Dal had won two seats, leaving just 7 seats for the opposition - Samajwadi Party, five and the Congress, two. A rally Modi could be held in each of these seats now,” a BJP leader indicated. Each rally would be arranged so as to cover maximum districts and Lok Sabha constituencies, party leaders said.

BJP chief Amit Shah, who is expected in Lucknow in the first week of July, could firm up the party’s campaign strategy in UP, which once again would revolve around Modi.

The party plan, a BJP insider says, is to continue to market Modi as ‘vikas purush’ (development man), with Yogi providing the Hindutva push to make it a combination of development and Hindutva, a cocktail that BJP served to the masses with great success, party leaders admit. Azamgarh is among the seats that BJP missed out in 2014. And to make Modi rally a success in SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav’s constituency, the BJP and RSS cadres are already working overtime to ensure a “hugely successful” show. Modi is also expected to lay the foundation stone of the purvanchal expressway – which would be connected with the existing Agra-Lucknow expressway that came up during Samajwadi Party’s tenure. “Once linked to the Agra-Lucknow expressway it would link east UP to west and the connectivity thus could transform purvanchal. The BJP would surely get the PM to talk how under him the focus is on developing the most backward districts of the state and the country,” said Athar Siddiqui of the Centre from Objective Research and Development.

A Modi rally is also being planned for either Basti or Gonda. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had broken the unwritten code of top leaders not campaigning in each other’s constituencies by getting Modi to campaign in Amethi, the Lok Sabha constituency of then Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, who has since taken over as the party chief. A Modi rally, sources said, is also expected in Kannauj, the present Lok Sabha constituency of Dimple Yadav, wife of SP chief Akhilesh Yadav who is now expected to contest from here.