Prashant Kishor has been roped in by Mamata Banerjee to boost her party’s prospects in Bengal polls
New Delhi:
A day after claiming that the BJP will struggle to cross double digits in the West Bengal assembly polls, election strategist Prashant Kishor on Tuesday challenged its leaders to say on record that they will quit their positions if the party failed to get 200 seats.
“BJP will struggle to cross double digits and will get less than 100 seats in West Bengal. Will quit my work if they do,” Mr Kishor told PTI, reiterating his assessment.
He also clarified that if the party does any better than what he has predicted, he would quit his work.
Mr Kishor, who managed Narendra Modi’s successful campaign for prime ministership in 2014, has been roped in by TMC chief Mamata Banerjee to boost her party’s prospects in the West Bengal assembly polls likely in April-May next year.
On Monday, he tweeted that the BJP would struggle to cross double digits in West Bengal, setting off a war of words with BJP leaders on the microblogging website.
His remarks came after senior BJP leader and Union Minister Amit Shah’s visit to West Bengal during which political heavyweight Suvendu Adhikari, nine MLAs and a TMC MP joined the party.
Mr Shah, considered the architect of the BJP’s resurgence in West Bengal, had asserted that his party will win over 200 seats in the upcoming polls.
BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, the party’s pointsman in the state, took a swipe at Mr Kishor, saying the country will end up losing a poll strategist after the West Bengal elections.
“Given the ongoing BJP tsunami in Bengal, once the new government is formed, the country will have to lose an election strategist,” Mr Vijayvargiya quipped in Hindi on Twitter.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
