Want to win polls? Campaign like RSS: NCP chief Sharad Pawar tells party cadre

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Sharad Pawar said on Thursday that the approach to reach out to the public only when elections are looming large, is the reason why they suffered a setback.

He also exhorted his party cadre to learn from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's (RSS) style of campaigning while seeking votes.

He told his cadre at a party meet in Pune to start with door-to-door campaigning immediately, and not just ahead of the Maharashtra Assembly elections.

As per a report by NDTV he also said: “If you do this, voters will stop asking 'Why do you remember us only now’.”

Persistence, he said, is the key to establishing a connect with the electorate. Once again upholding the RSS method of canvassing votes, the NCP chief said: “You (party workers) should see how RSS workers campaign. If they visit five houses and one of them is locked, they keep returning until they have sent their message across. They know very well how to maintain contact with the people.”

Notably, the Nationalist Congress Party won in only four of the 19 seats it fought from in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The only other party to fare worse than it did was its alliance partner Congress, that won in only one of the 25 constituencies it fought from.

Sharad Pawar's words of advice for his cadre come barely four months before the Assembly elections begin in Maharashtra. In the previous polls, NCP’s political rival BJP won in 122 of the 288 constituencies in the state legislative assembly, followed by the Shiv Sena party, which won in 63 seats. The NCP had got only 41 seats then.

The state Congress unit is also in shambles at the moment as veteran leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil decided to quit the party. There are rumours that he may join the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and poach 10 more lawmakers with him. Such speculations abound since the party performed very poorly in the recently concluded national general elections.