Tech To The Booth: BJP's Mission 51

Aiming at a 51 per cent vote share in 2023, the ruling party in MP has deployed digital technology to micro-manage its booth-level voter outreach

- Rahul Noronha in Bhopal

WHEN IT COMES TO SETTING targets and working towards them, none does it better than the BJP. The assembly election in Madhya Pradesh may be more than a year and half away, but the state unit is ensuring 2023 is not a repeat of 2018. In that election, the saffron party’s 41.02 per cent vote share proved insufficient to make it the largest party in the 230-member assembly. The Congress, with a marginally smaller vote share of 40.89 per cent, bagged 114 seats—five more than the BJP’s 109—and went on to form the government. Jyotiraditya Scindia’s rebellion in March 2020 and shift to the BJP along with 22 MLAs saw Shivraj Singh Chouhan return as chief minister. Yet, the two-year hiatus after 15 years at the helm put a question mark on the saffron party’s electoral dominance in the state. Unwilling to leave anything to chance, the BJP has turned to a booth-based statistical model to increase its vote share by 10 per cent in 2023. Hence Mission 51.