Indus Valley Times

By Sukant Mohanty

Bhubaneswar, May 31: Odisha state unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday launched a month-long special public relations campaign called Maha Jansampark Abhiyan to mark the completion of nine years of the Modi government.

The campaign will be held across the country till June 30.

“The month-long campaign aims to reach out to the public and media and brief them about the achievements of PM Modi and the BJP since 2014,” Odisha BJP president Manmohan Samal said at a press conference here.

“We aim to reach out to at least 3 crore families and a total of 36,606 booths in Odisha. At least 5 lakh BJP workers will participate in the campaign. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, home minister Amit Shah and defence minister Rajnath Singh will also come to Odisha,” Samal added.

Central ministers, BJP leaders will hold press conferences and brief about the achievements of PM Modi in the past nine years. They will also interact with the media and people of the state and give a presentation based on all the achievements of the Modi government.

BJP workers and leaders will also conduct various programs to contact the public.

Around five lakh BJP workers will visit households in every nook and corner of the state and apprise people about the various developmental workers undertaken or completed by the Modi government.

The BJP aims to hold public functions and tell people about the development projects such as highways, railway stations, and infrastructure development among others.

They will also apprise people about all the beneficiaries of the Union government and the schemes that have given direct benefits to the people.

Through its Maha Jansampark Abhiyan, the BJP state unit wants to consolidate its footprints in Lok Sabha and assembly constituencies to put up a good fight in 2024 elections

Ever since it was thrown out of an 11-year-old a coalition with the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), the saffron party has been desperately seeking to avenge the humiliation. However, it has not been able to make any substantial dents into the BJD vote banks that stood at 44 per cent in2019 assembly polls.

In 2000, the BJP had won 38 seats of the 64 it had contested in alliance with the BJD. In 2019, it won 23 of the 147 seats contested from, as against a 120-plus target set by home minister Amit Shah.

The BJP has lost seven assembly by-polls held after 2019 elections.

What has worried the party leaders is that in the 2022 rural and urban local body polls the party performance was far below its expectation. The party won only 42 Zilla Parishad (ZP) seats with a meager strike rate of 4.91per cent. The party’s vote share stood at 30.07 per cent, 2.42 per cent less than its 2019 vote share in assembly elections.

In the municipal polls, the party won 16 of the 108 municipal chairman posts as against 76 bagged by the BJD.