A letter lost in the post in 1916 was finally delivered to a London address more than a century after being sent from Bath.
Bearing a penny George V stamp and Bath and Sydenham postmarks, it dropped through the letterbox of theatre director Finlay Glen’s Crystal Palace flat in 2021.
It was addressed to Katie Marsh, who was married to the stamp dealer Oswald Marsh, and was sent by her friend Christabel Mennell, who was holidaying in Bath, according to research by Stephen Oxford, the editor of The Norwood Review, a local history magazine.
It begins: “My dear Katie, will you lend me your aid – I am feeling quite ashamed of myself after saying what I did at the circle.”
Parts of the letter are difficult to read but it mentions someone being unwell. Photograph: Finlay Glen
Royal Mail said it remained “uncertain what happened in this instance”. But Oxford said it was likely the letter got lost at the Sydenham sorting office, which has closed. “I think it is being redeveloped. So, in that process they must have found this letter hidden somewhere, perhaps fallen behind some furniture.”
He said: “The Upper Norwood and Crystal Palace area became very popular with wealthy middle-class people in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The letter is from Christabel Mennel, the daughter of a local wealthy tea merchant, Henry Tuke Mennell. And she was friends with Catherine – or Katie – Marsh.
“Oswald Marsh is recorded in 1901 living in Crystal Palace as a lodger and as a stamp dealer. He was 20 then and I suspect he was being funded by his father, who was a quite wealthy architect who lived in Northern Ireland. They were a Quaker family.”
Oswald, who married Catherine in 1904, would become a highly regarded stamp dealer who was often called as an expert witness in cases of stamp fraud, and later moved from where the letter was addressed to a large Victorian house with stables nearby.
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Finlay Glen with the letter outside his flat. Photograph: Finlay Glen
The house the letter was addressed to has long been demolished and is now a block of flats. Parts of the letter are difficult to read, but it mentions someone being unwell.
Glen, 27, said when he and his girlfriend, Lucy, first saw the date “we thought 2016, then saw it had the king’s stamp on it, and realised 1916 so thought it was probably OK to open it.
“We were fairly mystified as to how it could have taken so long to be delivered but thought it must have got lodged somewhere in the sorting office and a century later was found and someone stuck it in the post.”
Initially, they “shoved it in a drawer”. The envelope was in fairly good condition, although a bit weathered at the top.
“We held on to it and tried to decipher it, though some is hard to read. And then we got in touch with the local historical society, because I thought they might be able to tell us about the people involved.
“I had no idea that so many people would find it so interesting.”
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#Letter #lost #delivered #London #years
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Some writers discover a territory and mine its riches: think Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Elizabeth Strout’s Maine, Colin Barrett’s small-town Mayo. Paul Harding is one such novelist. His first two books, Tinkers, which won a Pulitzer prize,andEnon, were both set in New England, and within the same family: the Crosbys, descendants of early European settlers on America’s eastern seaboard. In This Other Eden, Harding returns to the same coast. This time, though, he takes us just offshore to Apple Island – and here, “hardly three hundred feet across a channel from the mainland”, we’re among folk his readers will only have glanced in his fiction before.
Harding’s island is named after the apple trees planted by the first settler: “Benjamin Honey – American, Bantu, Igbo – born enslaved – freed or fled at fifteen, only he ever knew – ship’s carpenter, aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his wife, Patience, nee Rafferty, Galway girl, in 1793.” The story proper opens more than a century later, in 1911, with Esther, the great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience, and now matriarch of her own clan of Honeys, dozing in her rocking chair, grandchild on her lap, snow falling outside on a chill spring morning.
A handful of other people now live alongside the founding family. Based on the historical Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, home to a racially mixed fishing community from the civil war up until the early 20th century, Harding’s island is peopled by descendants of freedmen and Irish, of “Penobscot grandmothers and Swedish grandpas”, some still recognisably Angolan or Congolese in heritage, others like the Lark family “drained of all colour”. In their veins “run blood from every continent but Antarctica”.
Their lives are precarious. The Honeys live – just about – on carpentry; the McDermotts, who make their home in the shell of a beached schooner, by taking in washing. Esther’s nearest neighbour, Zachary, is a drifter and civil war veteran who spends his days carving scenes from the gospels into a hollow tree. Even the island itself is marginal, subject to flood tides of biblical proportions, the worst of which took the original orchard, Benjamin’s “half-remembered Eden no sooner restored than carried off by wind and rain”.
The islanders are proud, though. The supplies shipped over by well-meaning mainlanders are a puzzle to them: the shingles sent to repair their shacks are inferior to Zachary and Eha Honey’s handiwork, and Esther uses them for stove wood. The island’s children have free range, too, exploring and wandering long into the evenings, “the summer constellations humming, their light pulsing in time with the revolution of the planet”. So there is beauty here, and grace, and – crucially – refuge. Harding’s message is clear: only at the margins could such a community establish itself.
The mainland has also sent a minister. Matthew Diamond, “a courteous, plain white man”, strikes up a friendship of sorts with Esther. Surprised at her quick mind, he takes to sitting on her stoop, discussing scripture and Shakespeare. In Ethan, her grandson, Diamond sees an extraordinary talent for drawing.
For all his kindness and best intentions, Diamond wrestles with himself. His faith tells him “all men are brothers, all women his sisters”, but he still feels a “visceral, involuntary repulsion in the presence of a living Negro”. His attentions have also alerted others on the mainland. Journalists turn up to report on the “little rock’s queer brood”. Photographers make postcards to sell to the curious. Men come with callipers to measure heads, their interest eugenics, their intention to assess “the band of Nature’s problem children drifting off our shore”.
Through Diamond’s intercession, Ethan is offered tutelage on the mainland. As his drawing talent is undeniable and his skin light enough to pass, Esther knows this is a rare chance for her grandson. The potential reward is great, the risk equal: thus the scene is set for the further story’s unfolding.
Harding too is a risk-taker. Told in third person, but inhabiting multiple and often competing viewpoints, This Other Eden takes us inside Esther’s defiant penury, Zachary’s visions, Diamond’s “skewed, inexcusable heart”. Whether islander or mainlander, child or adult, each voice is wonderfully clear and distinct.
Harding’s use of time is equally deft. Tinkers was told over a dying man’s last hours: as George Crosby’s adult children gathered around him, he returned in visions to his own childhood, reconciling in memory with the father who long ago abandoned him. In Enon, the narrative opened with the death of Charlie Crosby’s young daughter, the story of his fatherhood and his family’s wider history revealed over the first raw year of his mourning. In This Other Eden, Harding takes a more elliptical approach. The three parts of the novel jump through time, from the opening among the island families, to Ethan’s new life on the mainland, and then back again, exploring the consequences of Diamond’s intervention not just for the boy, but for the whole island. Harding’s lightness of touch is masterful.
This Other Eden is a story of good intentions, bad faith, worse science, but also a tribute to community and human dignity and the possibility of another world. In both, it has much to say to our times.
This Other Eden is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Russia’s army is estimated to have lost nearly 40% of its prewar fleet of tanks after nine months of fighting in Ukraine, according to a count by the specialist thinktank the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS).
That rises to as much as 50% for some of the key tanks used in combat, forcing Russia to reach into its still sizeable cold war-era stocks. Ukraine’s tank numbers are estimated to have increased because of the number it has captured and supplies of Soviet-era tanks from its western allies.
John Chipman, the thinktank’s chair, said the war had been “a political and military failure for Russia” highlighting shortcomings in leadership and deficiencies in its munitions, despite Kremlin modernisation efforts.
“Russia’s actions over the past year have raised questions not only over the competence of its military and senior military leadership, but also over command cohesion,” he said, launching the IISS’s annual Military Balance audit of the world’s armed forces.
The thinktank’s figures are based largely on open source images from drones, satellites and on the battlefield, running from the beginning of the war to the end of November, although the conflict means numbers can only be estimated.
Its headline count is that Russia’s number of tanks in its army have reduced by 38% from 2,927 to 1,800, while there have been particularly heavy losses of its workhorse T-72B3, an upgrade first delivered to its army in 2013.
Heavy losses on the battlefield have meant that Russia had lost “around 50% of its pre invasion fleet” of the tank and a related variant, Chipman said, and slow industrial production was “forcing Moscow to rely on its older stored weapons as attrition replacements”.
Russian overoptimism meant that it suffered heavy tank losses at the beginning of the war, particularly in the abortive attack on Kyiv, where large numbers of tanks and armoured vehicles moving in a convoy were destroyed on roads north of the capital. Many others were captured or towed off by tractors as the assault failed.
Russian troops had anticipated being welcomed in Ukraine, and in some cases carried parade dress in the belief that after a blitzkrieg, the tanks would be used to stage a parade in Kyiv’s streets. Instead, they were picked off by Ukrainian artillery and infantry using anti-tank weapons.
There has been little sign of an improvement in tank tactics, with several dozen tanks estimated to have been lost in fighting since late January in a so far unsuccessful attempt to seize the Donbas town of Vuhledar. By using reconnaissance drones, Ukraine has been able knock out tanks with its artillery.
But, while the battlefield losses are notable, Russia retains a large number of old tanks in long-term storage, currently estimated at 5,000, meaning Moscow can continue to pursue an attritional strategy for some time to come.
graph
Ukraine, however, has seen its tank count go up to 953 from 858 because it has partly offset its own losses by capturing an estimated 500 from Russia, of which it has “pressed a fair amount into service”, according to the IISS analyst Henry Boyd. It has also had significant donations from Poland, the Czech Republic and other states with Soviet-era armour, but its tank force is currently still half the size of Russia’s.
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Kyiv is hoping to receive a wave of western tanks and fighting vehicles over the next couple of months, which it plans to use to achieve a battlefield breakthrough. German defence minister Boris Pistorius however cautioned on Wednesday it so far only has “half a battalion” of Leopard 2 tanks to send to Ukraine, 14 newer A6 type Leopard tanks in addition to three from Portugal.
Poland has also committed to sending a battalion of Leopard 2 tanks to Kyiv and is currently training Ukrainian troops to use them but Pistorius said “many” were not fit for battle.
Ben Barry, a land warfare analyst, said he reckoned Ukraine would ultimately receive about a quarter of the 1,000 tanks and fighting vehicles it had sought.
That might give it “tactical advantage”, Barry said, if accompanied by enough ammunition and spare parts. Even so, the analyst and former tank commander said, it was not clear “that Kyiv has enough combat power to rapidly eject Russian forces”.
Barry concluded that, as a result, “we can expect another bloody year” in which the fighting would be unpredictable – after a period in which it is estimated that least 200,000 people have been killed or wounded on both sides.
Additional reporting by Isobel Koshiw in Kyiv
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Patna: Lok Janshakti Party-Ram Vilas (LJPR) President Chirag Paswan on Thursday claimed that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has been losing credibility in a big way in state politics and should step down from the post.
“After losing the Kurhani b-poll, Nitish Kumar is no longer a popular leader of Bihar. The popularity of Nitish Kumar has been declining soon after he went to the Mahagathbandhan. Keeping in view the current position of JD-U, I firmly believe that those parties accepting Nitish Kumar will also lose their strength.
“Nitish Kumar keeps saying that the unity of Mahagathbandhan is stronger but the people of Bihar and leaders are thinking that his credibility has declined. They are not keeping faith in him. A large number of JD-U leaders recently joining the LJPR in poll-bound Nagaland is a prime example of it,” Paswan said.
He also claimed that the crime graph of Bihar is rising with murders, loots, rapes, dacoities taking place in Bihar and Nitish Kumar is not aware of it. “Every time he is being asked about a particular incident, he says he is not aware of it,” he alleged.
“Nitish Kumar, in a shade of liquor ban, is also destroying homeopathic treatment in Bihar and penalising the doctors. The use of spirit is frequent in homeopathy but the administration of Bihar under well planned conspiracy, penalises the homeopathic doctors. In a country like India, a large number of people believe in homeopathic treatment. I also believe in it. The central government is promoting homeopathic and ayurvedic treatment in the country but Nitish Kumar is thinking in another way,” Paswan said.
In the Saran hooch tragedy, that had taken over 100 lives in the first week of January, the mastermind was a homeopathic doctor who used spirit to make the liquor which turned poisonous.
New Delhi: In what could be touted as the worst month ever for tech workers, close to 1 lakh of them lost jobs in the month of January globally, dominated by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others.
It means that more than 3,300 tech employees lost jobs daily on an average by more than 288 companies worldwide.
Barring Apple, every other Big Tech firm has slashed jobs, led by Amazon with 18,000 job cuts, followed by Google with 12,000 and Microsoft 10,000 job cuts in January.
Salesforce (7,000), IBM (3,900) and SAP (3,000) were other tech companies that announced layoffs last month.
In 2022, over 1,000 companies laid off 154,336 workers, as per the data by layoffs tracking site Layoffs.fyi.
So in total, more than 2.5 lakh tech employees have lost jobs in 2022 and now.
As more and more Big Tech companies continue to sack employees, they listed various reasons behind the move — over-hiring, uncertain global macroeconomic conditions, strong tailwinds from the Covid-19 pandemic and more.
After laying off 11,000 employees, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg now wants 2023 to be the “year of efficiency”.
Joining the mass layoff season, online marketplace OLX Group slashed 15 per cent of its workforce, or more than 1,500 employees, globally including in India as part of restructuring amid the global meltdown and recession fears.
Edtech major BYJU’s has laid off further 15 per cent of its employees from its engineering teams.
According to sources, the company in a fresh round of layoffs asked more than 1,000 workers (or 15 per cent) to go, mostly from its engineering teams.
Hyderabad: Quli Qutub Shah Urban Development Authority (QQSUDA) is undertaking works to restore the lost glory of Laad Bazaar located near Charminar, Hyderabad.
In order to restore the lost glory, many steps are being taken. So far, the façade for the shops at Laad Bazaar has been finalized. It will ensure that all the shops at the famous bangle market will have a uniform design.
After inspecting the market on Friday, Municipal Administration and Urban Development Special Chief Secretary Arvind Kumar tweeted that QQSUDA will restore the market within a year.
Laad Bazaar in Hyderabad
Laad Bazaar, also known as Choodi Bazaar, is the famous bangle market in Hyderabad. It is located on one of the roads that branch out from Charminar.
Most of the shops that are located on this kilometer-long road sell bangles and wedding-related articles.
Laad Bazaar is famous in Hyderabad since the Qutb Shahi period. The market is located near the city’s many famous historical monuments such as Charminar, Makkah Masjid, Chowmahalla Palace, etc.
Khursheed Jah Devdi to be restored
Telangana government which is restoring many historical monuments in Hyderabad has recently announced the restoration of Khursheed Jah Devdi. It is located at Hussaini Alam.
Though the announcement was made in December 2022, the work is yet to begin.
Built by the ancestors of Paigah noble Khursheed Jah Bahadur, the monument is a European-styled architectural palace. Located just a kilometer away from Charminar, the palace is a notified heritage structure.
The palace which now needs to be restored was once decorated with exclusive chandeliers. The garden at the palace was full of flowers.
San Francisco: Apple’s AirTag has helped a passenger to track his lost wallet, even after American Airlines could not find it.
Taking to the micro-blogging platform Twitter, the passenger shared the incident on Sunday.
He mentioned that after realising that he lost his wallet, he contacted American Airlines and they said that they couldn’t find it.
Luckily, he had AirTag in his wallet with which he was able to track it.
After tracking, he discovered that the wallet was on the plane and had gone over to 35 cities.
Later, the airline replied to the passenger’s post, “Oh no, we’re sorry you left your wallet behind. Join us in DMs with your record locator, description and Lost and Found claim number.”
Last month, it was reported that the tracking device had helped Air Canada passengers to find their missing luggage which was on a different continent after a flight.
New Delhi: The Congress Saturday questioned the “silence” of the Union finance minister and probe agencies after LIC and SBI “lost over Rs 78,000 crore” in market capitalisation of their shares due to exposure in Adani Group.
LIC and SBI continue to invest in the Adani group even after the Hindenburg research report alleged share price manipulation and financial misappropriation by the group, Congress general secretary Randeep Surjewala claimed.
“LIC is public money! Post Hindenburg Report, the value of LIC investment in Adani Group shares have fallen from Rs 77,000 Crore to Rs 53,000 crore — loss of Rs 23,500 crore.
“Also, LIC shares have lost Rs 22,442 Crore. Why is LIC still investing Rs 300 crore in Adani Group,” Surjewala asked.
3/3 Between Jan. 24 and 27 i.e in 3 days, #SBI & #LIC have lost “market cap” of ₹ 78,118 CR in value of their shares alone!
The Loan Exposure of SBI & Invest Value decline of LIC in Adani Group is in addition thereto.
YET.. RBI, SEBI, ED, SFIO, CBI, FM remain on “mute” mode.
The Congress leader claimed that after the publication of the report, the SBI share’s market cap has declined by a whopping Rs 54,618 crore.
Also, the loan exposure of SBI and other banks to Adani Group is Rs 81,200 crore, he claimed.
“The question is, why are SBI Employees Pension Fund and SBI Life still investing Rs 225 crore in Adani Group,” Surjewala asked.
The Rajya Sabha MP also claimed that between January 24 and 27, the SBI and LIC lost a market cap of Rs 78,118 crore in value of their shares alone.
“The loan exposure of SBI and Invest Value decline of LIC in Adani Group is in addition thereto. Yet… RBI, SEBI, ED, SFIO, CBI, and the FM remain on ‘mute’ mode,” Surjewala said in a series of tweets.
The Congress leader has earlier said that elsewhere “the prime minister would be asked to explain, the finance minister would be sacked and a full investigation would have been ordered.”
The Hindenburg Report has pointed to the alleged manipulation of stock price by the Adani Group and alleged financial irregularities. The Adani Group has denied the allegations and termed it a campaign to defame the company ahead of its follow on a public issue.
But conservative conspiracy sites like The Gateway Pundit and the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit that filed lawsuits that unsuccessfully sought to overturn the 2020 election, have attacked ERIC as part of a liberal plot to control the underpinnings of American elections.
Allen’s abandonment of ERIC illustrates how ideas stemming from the falsehood of a stolen presidential election remain in the bloodstream of the American democratic system, even after its most well-known proponents were shut out from winning key positions in major swing states in the midterms.
It also suggests the era of bipartisan, behind-the-scenes, mundane cooperation on the mechanics of running elections is at risk.
“It’s not the start, nor the end,” said David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who was central to setting up ERIC over a decade ago. “If you’ve been to any meetings of election officials over the last few years — if you’ve been to anything where consensus is attempted — it seems that fewer and fewer want to engage in that.”
Becker, who is now the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, retains a non-voting position on the board of ERIC, which is otherwise made up of voting representatives from member states.
Allen’s office did not respond to an interview request or to written questions about his decision to pull the state out of ERIC. But in a statement accompanying his letter to ERIC, he said that: “Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me and to people that I heard from as I traveled the state for the last 20 months.”
ERIC collects voter registration and motor vehicle data from each member state regularly throughout the year, the organization says. That data is used to produce several reports identifying voters on their rolls who may have moved to or from other member states or within a state, who may be registered in multiple states — which in itself is not a crime — or who may have died.
The system can also generate a report on voters who may have voted in different states in the same election — which generally carries criminal penalties — and people who appear to be eligible but are unregistered to vote, which ERIC members are required to contact.
The Gateway Pundit published a series of posts in mid-January 2022 about ERIC, claiming it was part of a left-wing cabal. And in December 2022, the Thomas More Society said it has filed complaints in three states about ERIC and planned to continue to do so in more. A spokesperson for TMS did not respond to a request for an update on the filings.
Allen was the second secretary of state to pull his state out of ERIC. Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, a Republican, announced last January that Louisiana would “suspend” its participation in the program and sent a letter in July withdrawing entirely.
John Tobler, a spokesperson for Ardoin’s office, said the office had conversations with ERIC officials before it left, but did not make Ardoin available for an interview and declined to answer specific questions about the move.
The announcement from Ardoin’s office about the suspension alleged: “concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports about potential questionable funding sources and that possibly partisan actors may have access to ERIC network data.”
In a statement at the time, Ardoin said he spoke with “election attorneys and experts,” but did not identify those people, nor the watchdog groups and media reports. Ardoin’s campaign website says he “demanded answers from ERIC … to keep Louisiana’s elections secure,” linking to a brief local news article from January about the announcement.
On the campaign trail, Allen more closely echoed the postings from Gateway Pundit website: He said he opposed ERIC because it was a “Soros-funded, leftist group,” referencing the prominent liberal donor George Soros.
The group is entirely funded and controlled by member states, after receiving initial startup support from The Pew Charitable Trusts in 2012.
Despite the two states leaving the organization, ERIC still broadly maintains bipartisan support. Republican officials have praised ERIC for helping their states remove from the rolls voters who have either moved out of state or died, and for its use as a backstop to catch people who potentially cast ballots in two different states in one election.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis highlighted ERIC by name in a summer press conference as helping to catch potential cases of double voting. (DeSantis announced the state would join ERIC in 2019.) And one of its biggest proponents of the program was Allen’s predecessor, now-former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, who regularly defended the value of ERIC after Allen raised it as an issue on the campaign trail.
“ERIC does something that no other entity is capable of doing,” Merrill, a Republican, said in an interview in November, following the midterm elections. “The people who have complaints about ERIC and who have concerns about ERIC, don’t understand ERIC.”
Trey Grayson, a Republican and former Kentucky secretary of state who remains active in the election administration community, said in a text that he was a “big fan” of ERIC and that it was an “important tool” to maintain accurate voter rolls. He said it was disappointing to see the two states leave the group.
“I especially find it disappointing because in general we Republicans tend to care more about cleaning up the voter rolls,” Grayson wrote. “And these Republican secretaries are shooting those efforts in the foot with their decisions.”
Officials from other member states also expressed displeasure over the exit of Louisiana and Alabama. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said he was “disappointed with the decision because I think the more members there are in ERIC, the stronger ERIC is.”
The scuffle around ERIC is just one point of agitation between election officials. Recent public meetings of the National Association of Secretaries of State, a longstanding, bipartisan organization, have showcased the tension growing within the group. Sessions at NASS meetings now focus on the increasingly fraught task of ensuring the safety of election officials from physical threats, and there has been public chatter about the risk of insider threats to election offices.
And a few sessions have triggered sharp disagreements among secretaries that, at times, have gotten heated. That could continue to grow, with several newly-elected secretaries in red states who have at least questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election now eligible to join the organization, Allen among them.
But Simon — who is set to assume the NASS presidency in the summer of 2024 and helped lead a near-unanimous NASS resolution for election audits in 2021 — said he was still hopeful that there would be plenty of room for behind-the-scenes election cooperation to survive and thrive.
“I actually have thought about that,” Simon said when asked if the tension around ERIC could metastasize into something more. “We might have differences, including on this issue, but I really don’t think it changes the fundamentals. … So I don’t see this as a body blow to cooperation among secretaries of state of varying political viewpoints.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Bhopal: The BJP has geared up for the upcoming assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh as the party has started preparations to bring the government, organisation and all the leaders to the ground level.
The main focus of the Bharatiya Janata Party this time is on the 103 assembly seats where MLAs belonging to Congress and other parties are there.
In the assembly elections held in the state in 2018, the BJP lagged behind the Congress and even lost power.
However, the party returned to power due to the defection of Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, and also won the bypolls, but the party is worried about the upcoming elections. This is the reason why all the big leaders are being made partners in the election campaign.
According to the information received from BJP sources, a meeting of the State Working Committee is going to be held in the coming days, in which ministers of the state government, MLAs, MPs, besides central ministers are being called. This meeting is very important for the upcoming polls as the road map for the elections can be finalized in this meeting.
If party sources are to be believed, the BJP is eyeing most of the 103 assembly seats which are held by Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party or independent candidates.
BJP has been engaged in ground preparation for a long time regarding how these seats can be won. Now all the big leaders of the party are sitting together trying to implement the feedback received from the grassroots level.
Party sources say that on the 127 seats in the state where the BJP has sitting MLAs, the displeasure of the general public can be reduced by changing the face of the candidate and by making other efforts
It won’t be very difficult to win the 103 seats where the opposition MLAs are there because resentment is there towards the MLAs of those areas and it is easy to cash in on that.
BJP has been continuously gathering ground feedback for more than a year and on the basis of this, the party has made up its mind to work on the upcoming strategy.
In the meeting of the National Working Committee held in Delhi recently, some instructions have been given to the prominent leaders of the state and to take these instructions to the lower level, a gathering of big leaders is going to be held in Bhopal in the coming days.