PM Modi away, Amit Shah, senior BJP leaders hold fort in Varanasi: ‘Koi fight hi nahi hai’

As the curtains came down on the Lok Sabha election campaign and Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his 45-hour meditation retreat at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial in Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, the one place missing from his itinerary in the final days leading up to polling on June 1 was his constituency Varanasi.

The PM left the responsibility of supervising the election in Varanasi to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, his second-in-command who in the past couple of days held meetings with senior leaders Union Ministers Piyush Goel and Giriraj Singh, and BJP national general secretary Sunil Bansal. The three, along with a team of key BJP and RSS functionaries, have been managing the party’s affairs in the run-up to voting.

Among the others who held a meeting with Shah were BJP ally and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) chief Om Prakash Rajbhar and former Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Narad Rai, who joined the BJP on Tuesday. Sources in the BJP said Shah assigned tasks to his senior party colleagues, Rajbhar, and Rai who is from the Bhumihar community. Of the 19.62 lakh voters in Varanasi, there are more than 1.5 lakh Bhumihar and about 70,000 Rajbhar voters.

In the past few days, the BJP has mobilised workers from different states and districts of Uttar Pradesh to help with the campaign. Party workers from Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan are making rounds of areas where Tamils, Telugu people and people from Rajasthan live. At the party’s massive central election office in Varanasi’s Mehmoorganj locality, there was an air of calm and confidence. Apart from the out-of-state workers being assigned their duties, five local BJP office-bearers sat in a corner of a big hall, a register and heaps of