PM's marathon 51-day campaign sees 142 rallies, 1/3rd of them in UP and West Bengal

142 rallies plus four road shows, including one-third of those rallies done in just the two states of Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, capped up Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 51-day campaign report card in the 2019 general elections. BJP President Amit Shah said 1.5 crore people were reached by these PM rallies.

The PM's focus also remained on the Congress-ruled Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where he did nine and eight rallies respectively, with 29 and 25 seats up for grabs here. The big push was however clearly in Eastern Uttar Pradesh where Modi did 18 rallies in last three phases compared to only 11 in Western UP in first 4 phases - escalating his presence there 100 per cent from three rallies per phase to six rallies per phase as the elections ended. The PM did a total of 29 rallies in UP. The other focus state was the 42-seat West Bengal where Modi did 17 rallies to take the fight to Mamata Bannerjee. Other big states like Bihar and Maharashtra, which have 40 and 48 seats respectively, saw the PM do only do ten & nine rallies respectively. A senior BJP leader explained this to ET that BJP had major allies in Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) and Shiv Sena in those two states and hence the PM’s workload was shared by the Chief Minister in Bihar and Uddhav Thackeray in Maharashtra.

The PM did almost 3-4 rallies daily, escalating the same to five rallies in a day on two occasions, and taking a break only for 3-4 days in between since he started his election campaign on March 28 in Meerut and ended the same in Khargone in Madhya Pradesh on Friday. There were some notable omissions from the PM’s campaign too – like him doing no public rally in important seats like his own constituency of Varanasi and not holding public rallies in Chief Minister’s Yogi Adityanath’s old constituency of Gorakhpur and Bhopal from where the BJP had fielded the controversial Sadhvi Pragya Singh. The PM only did a booth workers meeting in Varanasi on the day he filed his nomination and a road show a day before and did not return to his constituency for campaigning. “We are winning Varanasi and Gorakhpur easily. There was hence no need for the PM to campaign there,” the BJP leader quoted above told ET. In smaller states like Jharkhand, Punjab and Haryana, PM did three rallies apiece while he did seven rallies apiece in Karnataka and Gujarat. The four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala however saw only two rallies apiece of the Prime Minister.

After the hectic campaign, Modi is now slated to take a 'spiritual break' for two days on May 18 and 19 when he will head for the twin shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath. The PM will arrive in Kedarnath on the evening of May 18 and is expected to spend some time in meditation caves built for pilgrims near the Kedarnath temple. He is expected to travel to Badrinath later, in what will be his first visit to Badrinath as the PM. The visit is however dependent on weather conditions, officials told ET.