Watch Nidhi Razdan: BJP targets 370 seats in India’s parliament

Gulf News

India’s Prime Minister Modi has set the tone for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Lok Sabha campaign with a call for the party to win 370 seats and for its NDA alliance to cross 400. It is a target that he is now repeatedly talking about as the BJP hopes to ride back comfortably for a third straight term in power. 370 is not a random number.  It symbolises the law which gave Jammu and Kashmir its special status under Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which was hollowed out by parliament in August 2019. This was one of the major goals of the RSS-BJP combine for decades and why 370 is a special number for them.   Read the full story here: https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/india-can-bjp-win-370-seats-in-2024-elections-1.101357933  See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km  Subscribe to Gulf News on YouTube and watch more of our videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/GulfNewsTV  #UAEnews #India #politics

Transcript

00:00The dates for the Lok Sabha elections will be out any day now, and the BJP has set a

00:08very ambitious target for itself. 370 seats for the party and more than 400 for its alliance,

00:15the NDA. The question is, will the BJP realistically be able to achieve this 370 target? Currently,

00:22they have 303 MPs in the Lok Sabha, which means they need to get 67 more seats. And

00:27where are these seats going to come from? If you look at some of the key Hindi heartland

00:31states, whether it is Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Haryana, etc, these are states

00:36where the BJP has actually already maxed out. It's won either all the seats in these states

00:40or all but one, all but two. And therefore, you know, in order to win 370, they would

00:46have to retain their strongholds. It's not going to be easy to do, especially with the

00:50party seeking a third straight term in power. But that is going to be a key challenge. They're

00:54very hopeful about Uttar Pradesh, where they have 62 out of the 80 seats in the Lok Sabha.

00:59They're hoping that with the Ram Temple inauguration, they will cross the 70 mark, maybe even 75

01:05plus there. But Maharashtra is going to be a key state because it sends the second largest

01:09number of MPs into parliament. And this is where things could really go either way. We've

01:14seen the Shiv Sena has split since 2019, when they last fought the elections with the BJP

01:20together. There's a lot of sympathy for Uddhav Thackeray, who is with the opposition faction

01:24with the Congress and Sharad Pawar's NCP. So Maharashtra is going to be very important.

01:28In addition to this, there are about 285 seats where the BJP strike rate in the last election

01:34was about 40%. This is where they will hope to do better and pick up a few seats here

01:38and there, whether it's Telangana, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, etc. But also the party is focusing

01:45on about 133 seats that they lost in 2019, of which many are seats that they came in

01:53second place. So they're hoping that these are seats by targeting them specifically,

01:57they can improve their tally and hope to pick up some seats. In the end, though,

02:01will it add up to 370? Like I said, it's a tough task, but nothing is impossible in politics.

02:07There are lots of variables at play in this election, including the fact that the opposition

02:11is in such disarray. But there are headwinds that the BJP is also encountering, like the

02:15farmer protests. How these issues play out in the next few weeks and months will be key.

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