BJP’s ally outreach programme: Fearing NDA allies might turn, Amit Shah to meet Uddhav, Badal this week

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The latest by-election debacle in made one thing amply clear — to repeat the 2014 mandate in the upcoming 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party needs allies. The BJP managed to win just one of the four Lok Sabha seats and one of the 10 Assembly seats where bypolls were held. While the BJP alliance retained two LS seats — one in Maharashtra and another in Nagaland — it lost two others: Uttar Pradesh’s Kairana and Maharashtra’s Bhandara-Gondiya.The Uttar Pradesh results came as the biggest upset for the saffron party as the joint Opposition candidate Tabassum Hasan — a Rashtriya Lok Dal candidate contesting on Samajwadi Party ticket — won Kairana. Apart from Uttar Pradesh, bypolls in Maharashtra — Palghar and Bhandara-Gondiya — and Bihar’s Jokihat were those being eagerly watched. The results of the two Lok Sabha seats (Palghar and Bhandara-Gondiya) in Maharashtra are important for all four major political parties — BJP, Shiv Sena, Congress and NCP — as the outcome is expected have a bearing on their future course. While BJP retained Palghar, NCP wrested power in Bhandara-Gondiya. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), another BJP ally, faced massive defeat in the hands of Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD.Following the election disaster, BJP was catapulted its top leaders in damage-control mode, especially when former allies and a few who still are part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), seem to lose faith in the invincibility of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo in bagging elections. The election setbacks emboldened the not-so-happy partners of the NDA who acknowledged that the 2014 sheen of the saffron party is clearly waning.

A miffed Shiv Sena has repeatedly hit out at the BJP for what it calls a high-handed attitude of the NDA leader towards its smaller allies. Opposition’s desperation to overthrow BJP from the Centre has reached such a level that Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy, after losing the Rajarajeshwari Nagar seat to Congress, said that it doesn’t matter whether JD(S) loses, “we wanted to ensure BJP’s loss in the constituency.”

With a situation as this one in their hand, BJP president Amit Shah has a jam-packed week ahead — he is travelling to Mumbai on Wednesday to meet Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray at 6 pm at the latter’s residence Matoshree.

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