After making substantial inroads into Shiv Sena's traditional Marathi vote bank during the Mumbai Municipal polls, the BJP now seems to have shifted into poll over-drive in Mumbai. The target audience, this time, is the city's slum-dwelling populace. This is to attract voters from all 36 constituencies in the state ahead of the Assembly elections in 2019.
The micro-target of the party will be 18 lakh people residing in 3.5 lakh slum clusters, who are now eligible for a home —by paying just the construction cost —under the Prime Minister's Awas Yojana (PMAY).
This follows the state government's decision to provide legal protection to slums by increasing cut-off date for rehabilitation to January 1, 2011 from January 1, 2000.
"All credit goes to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis for devising a scheme for the rehabilitation of shanties up to 2011," City unit chief Ashish Shelar said, "The slum-dwellers will get home in the city; it's now reality under the BJP regime. No other government thought of this earlier."
To achieve this, the party will hold rallies, corner meetings, launch a media blitzkrieg, distribute 25 lakh leaflets and help all the habitants with the registration process to procure a 269 sq ft home under PMAY.
Shelar informed that he will address two rallies each in all the 36 Assembly segments and similar meetings will be addressed by other party office bearers. Additionally, seven tempo chariots will be dispatched throughout the city to spread the word.
Though Shelar may tout this as BJP's brainchild, 'Shivshahi Punarvasan Prakalp', launched in 1995 during the Sena-BJP rule, was a dream project of the late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray and aimed at housing 40 lakh slum-dwellers. The project started with a bang but fizzled out later. BJP wants to counter this with an improved version of its own.
In the 2014 Assembly elections, BJP won 15 seats, one more than Sena's tally. Now the party has set an ambitious target of winning 25 seats. Hence, it has become imperative to reach out to this mass base of voters.
