For its third bid for power, BJP drops a fourth of its sitting MPs, more may follow

Insix lists released of candidates for just over 400 seats for the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP has denied tickets to a fourth, or about 100, of its sitting MPs.

This is a continuation of the 2019 trend, when the party did not field 99 of its sitting MPs. In 2019, the BJP had fielded candidates on 437 Lok Sabha seats, leaving the rest for its allies.

This time, the party has announced candidates for 405 seats. Adjusted for withdrawals and replacements, the party has already crossed the 400-mark in fielded candidates, thus still having a few dozen candidates left to field. This means that the number of sitting MPs not fielded will likely be larger than the last time, as more sitting MPs may not get tickets.

The strategy is in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempt at beating anti-incumbency by replacing the local faces. The PM has been emphasising in multiple rallies over the last few months that the ‘lotus’, the party’s symbol, should be the only candidate for all workers of the party – thus making each candidate replaceable, with none having the entitlement to demand tickets. The focus of the campaign is on the PM, his welfare schemes for different sections of society, and on what the party claims are his foreign and economic policy achievements.

A subset of the above strategy is that winnability remains a prime factor. This means that those who were ministers via the Rajya Sabha – including Dharmendra Pradhan, Bhupender Yadav and Rajeev Chandrashekhar — have been asked to throw their hats into the ring. This was a change Modi brought to the BJP’s electoral strategy as early as 2014, when he made even Arun Jaitley, then a long-standing Rajya Sabha MP, contest polls, which he lost to the Congress’s former Punjab CM