BJP National General Secretary, Tarun Chugh recently said that the party has started the preparations on a warpath to contest all the 117 Vidhan Sabha seats in 2022 elections in Punjab.

Chugh said that the party is strengthening its organization at 23000 polling booths by mobilizing BJP workers at the grassroots level to contest all seats in the next Punjab Assembly polls.

BJP President J P Nadda virtually inaugurated 10 district offices of the party on November 19 and thereafter undertook a three-day tour to the state to take a stock of the preparations and galvanize party workers for the forthcoming assembly poll battle.

Chugh said that the party leaders led by state unit president Ashwani Sharma will popularize 160 public welfare schemes launched by the GOI in Punjab and apprise people of the progress made on them in the state.

As per the seat-sharing formula between both parties, BJP used to field its candidates on three of the 13 parliamentary seats and 23 of 117 assembly constituencies in Punjab. The rest were kept for the SAD.

Nearly two months ago, the Shiromani Akali Dal, an old ally of the BJP, had quit the NDA over differences over the controversial Centre’s farm bills i.e. Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Service Act, 2020, and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.The party’s MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal had also resigned from the Union Cabinet.

Chugh however, claimed that his party has a presence across the state. He added, “We may have had an alliance and Akalis did fight on the bulk of seats, but it would be wrong to presume that we do not have any base in the rest of the seats in Punjab. The last election that we fought alone was in 1992.” He said that besides dissidents from Akali Dal, sections of the Congress’ state leadership too was in touch with the BJP.

In the 2017 Assembly polls, Congress had won an absolute majority in the state by winning 77 seats and ousted the Akali-BJP government after 10 years. The BJP-SAD alliance had performed poorly in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, as they had won two seats each, while Congress had bagged 8 seats.

The author is a student member of Amity Centre of Happiness