Basking in the victory of three State Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday decided to aggressively launch its “Mission 272 Plus’’ (the cut off mark in the Lok Sabha to form government) campaign for the coming general election under the “Narendra Modi for Prime Minister’’ message across the nation.

At a news conference here at the party headquarters after a day-long series of meetings of the party’s Central Election Campaign Committee and the Chief Ministers, BJP’s national spokesperson and MP Prakash Javadekar sounded a note of urgency, saying the next 120 days would be divided into two slots of 60 days — first slot for finalising the party’s poll preparations and the next 60 days for campaigning.

The message of “Narendra Modi for PM’’ would be aggressively marketed to reach out to more than 10 crore people. As part of the drive, BJP workers would also collect funds under the “One Vote, One Note’’ programme. On Sunday, Modi had coined “Vote for India’’ slogan at his Mumbai rally.

“We will take contributions from the people from as low as Rs 10 to a maximum of Rs 1,000 towards our campaign,’’ sais BJP general secretary and MP Ananth Kumar earlier in the day.

However, Javadekar, responding to a query if the BJP had taken a leaf out of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) strategy of connecting with people, said the party had taken cue from the 1977 general elections when donations were sought from the people after Jaya Prakash Narain’s movement which brought the Janata Party-rule at the Centre.

The party seeks to capitalise on its electoral victory in three States and coming close to grabbing power in Delhi. He claimed that the BJP had become a symbol of good governance.

On the strategy to take the ruling Congress party head on during the campaign, Javadekar said the BJP would be ready with a ‘chargesheet’ against the Congress about its alleged misrule and misdeeds in the past decade, party’s vision document and the manifesto.

(This news report first appeared in The Hindu print edition dated December 25, 2013.)

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