PM to launch e-way projects, BJP’s 2019 poll drive in Baghpat, Azamgarh

NEW DELHI: After the Karnataka assembly election, the BJP’s focus is set to shift to Uttar Pradesh, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has chosen Baghpat and Azamgarh to launch two major expressway projects in the next fortnight and in the process kick off the party’s campaign for the 2019 general election in India’s most populous state. Besides, party president Amit Shah is expected to start chairing region-wise meetings in UP soon.
Baghpat, in western UP, is the longtime constituency of Rashtriya Lok Dal leader Ajit Singh and his late father, Jat leader Chaudhary Charan Singh, while Azamgarh, in eastern UP, is that of Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav.

On May 27, the PM will visit Khekra in Baghpat to inaugurate the 135-km long Eastern Peripheral Expressway which starts from Palwal in Haryana and culminates at Kundli in Haryana after passing through Noida, Ghaziabad and Baghpat districts of UP. The choice of the venue is significant as Chaudhary Charan Singh’s death anniversary falls on May 29 and a crucial bypoll will take place in the adjoining Kairana on May 28.

The PM will address a public rally in Baghpat a day after his government completes four years in power. BJP’s Baghpat MP, Satya Pal Singh, who defeated Ajit Singh in the last Lok Sabha polls, is supervising arrangements for the PM’s rally. “The PM will be sending a message to western UP with this rally in Jat-dominated Baghpat. Jats helped us win here in 2014 and 2017,” a BJP leader told ET.

The BJP is especially focusing on the seven Lok Sabha seats it could not win in UP in 2014. In this context, it is significant that the PM will lay the foundation stone of the country’s longest expressway, the Poorvanchal Expressway from Lucknow to Ghazipur, in Azamgarh in the first week of June and hold a public rally.

Mulayam Singh Yadav is the sitting MP from Azamgarh and it is expected that he will no longer contest from this seat in 2019. The BJP is hence keen to wrest Azamgarh, a seat it has held in the past.