Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah will begin a three-day tour of Kerala and Tamil Nadu on Friday with an eye on expanding the party’s base in the two States that go to the polls in 2016. The tour will kick off the party’s expansion plan targeting the southern States, which it considers “fertile ground for both vertical and horizontal growth,” a senior party leader told The Hindu.
The BJP is upbeat after it registered gains in vote share in the two States in the 2014 Lok Sabha election and is determined to register a greater presence in them in the Assembly elections to expand its national footprint. Mr. Shah will use the membership drive as an excuse to put an organisational framework in place to attract new followers, party strategists say.
The party currently has one Lok Sabha seat in Tamil Nadu and none in Kerala. Of the 132 seats in the five southern States and Union Territories, it has 22. “There is compelling logic and appealing conditions for the BJP to grow in the South. Besides, we have already peaked in the North and the West,” party general secretary P. Muralidhar Rao told The Hindu. Mr. Rao is in charge of party affairs in Karnataka and also handles Tamil Nadu.
