Amit Shah to target constituencies of Mamata Banerjee, Naveen Patnaik

As part of 'vistarak' tour, Shah is slated to spend 3 days each in WB, Odisha, Telangana, TN, Kerala

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah will visit a polling booth in Kolkata’s Bhawanipur on Wednesday. It is the assembly constituency of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and the symbolism is self-evident. The BJP chief wants his party structure galvanised in the home turf of the Trinamool Congress chief.

Next month, Shah will visit Odisha as part of his ‘vistarak’, or party expansion, tour of five states where the BJP has traditionally been weak. In Odisha, Shah is likely to spend a day visiting a polling booth in state CM Naveen Patnaik’s assembly constituency Hinjli in Ganjam district. A party General Secretary said the Odisha itinerary of the BJP chief is yet to be finalized, but said Shah could visit booth level workers of the party in Hinjli.

As part of his ‘vistarak’ tour, Shah is slated to spend three days each in Bengal, Odisha, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

It isn’t known if Shah will visit Telangana CM K Chandrasekhar Rao’s assembly constituency Gajwel in Medak district, or that of Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan’s assembly seat. The itineraries of these visits is still being worked out.

On Tuesday, Shah spent the day meeting polling booth level workers of the BJP in Naxalbari. This village in West Bengal’s Siliguri is known as the birthplace of Naxalism. The symbolism of the visit was obvious as it came within 24 hours of Naxal, or Maoist, attack in Chhattisgarh in which 25 paramilitary personnel were killed.

Shah said Naxalbari was once known for violence, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message of development has reached this border village as well. He said lotus, the BJP election symbol, will soon bloom in Bengal despite the violence perpetrated by Trinamool cadres on BJP workers. The BJP strategy in the short term is to replace the Left parties as the principal opposition to the Trinamool in Bengal. The party believes it has already acquired  that space in Odisha by dislodging the Congress as the principal opposition in the panchayat elections in February.

Shah's campaign is part of BJP’s plans for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. It has identified 120-seats in its electorally weaker areas in northeastern and coastal states that it hopes to win in 2019, and compensate for any losses in its strongholds in north and west.

"In 2019, the BJP will get the maximum number of seats in West Bengal. The people of the country will witness it," Shah said in Naxalbari.

BJP general secretary Arun Singh said this was the first time in 70-years of independent India’s democratic history that the president of a national party was spending over four months, from now to September, to visit booth level workers of the party in far flung areas.

Apart from the ‘vistarak’ tour, Shah will also embark on a ‘vistrit’, or extensive tour, where he will spend a couple of days in the capital of each of the 29 states and seven union territories to review the work of the party's state units.