With low voter turnout having affected the party's electoral fortunes in Uttar Pradesh in the past, the BJP has set a target for every party worker to bring 50 new voters into its fold. "As far as the voter tendency is concerned, the reluctance on the part of the BJP voter costed us dear both in the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls. The voters of the other parties voted, while our voters did not," UP BJP chief Ramapati Ram Tripathi told PTI.
Quoting records, he said "The BJP in the 1998 general elections won 58 Lok Sabha seats from UP with a voting percentage of 55.5. In 1999 general elections, the party managed to get 29 seats and the voting percentage declined by two per cent to 53.4".
The last Lok Sabha polls in 2004 saw the party getting 11 seats, as the voting percentage dwindled to 48.5 per cent.
Similar was the picture in the UP assembly polls. The party won 176 seats out of 425 seats with a voting percentage of 57.13 per cent in 1993. In the 1996 assembly polls despite a fall in voting percentage to 55.73 per cent, the party managed to retain 176 seats.
In 2002, the further dip in voting percentage to 53 per cent reduced the number of seats won by the party to 88 (out of 403), while the decline in the voting percentage to less than 50 per cent (46 per cent) in the 2007 Assembly polls costed the party quite heavy and it could win only 51 seats.
Attributing the party's loss in the 2007 assembly polls to low voter turnout, Tripathi said, "In 43 seats across the state, the margin of loss for the party candidates was from 400 to 4,600 votes, while in 38 seats where the party lost, the voter turnout was less than 36 per cent."
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Keeping this in mind, the party is trying to motivate its supporters to come out and vote.
"Our main thrust is on motivating the BJP voters so that they reach out to the polling booths and exercise their franchise instead of just seeing their party winning," he said.
Asked what steps have been taken by the party to change the scenario, Shyamnandan Singh, who is handling the election management of the party in UP, said, "At this point of time our main thrust is to reach to new voters and induct more new voters into our fold and we have held a number of 'nav matdata sammelan' (first time voters' meet)."
Groundwork in this regard has been going on for the last one and a half year. "Booth level committees have been formed in the state and almost 75 per cent of the job has been done."
The party has divided 1,27,505 booths in the state in form of sanch (cluster) and sector. Five booths form a sanch, while five sanch form a sector and the party has also set a target for the party workers.
"On an average one Vidhan Sabha consists 300 booths. Every party worker has been given a target to bring 50 new voters to the party's fold, which will result in increasing 15,000 new voters from an assembly constituency," Singh said.