Mumbai: Ahead of the Maharashtra assembly elections, Union Home Minister and senior BJP leader Amit Shah on Tuesday held a key meeting with party MLAs and a select group of workers in Mumbai during his latest visit to the state.
Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, state BJP president Chandrashekhar Bawankule and party's Mumbai unit head Ashish Shelar, among others, were present at the meeting in Dadar where Shah also addressed the gathering.
There are 36 assembly seats in Mumbai of which the BJP won 16 in the 2019 polls. Elections to the 288-member state assembly are expected to be held in November.
Shah, a key election strategist of the BJP who was on his third visit to Maharashtra in a fortnight, last month completed tour of the Vidarbha region, where he engaged with party workers and local legislators.
During the visit, Shah was reported to have encouraged BJP workers to strive for a 10 per cent increase in votes in Vidarbha, a party bastion, compared to the 2019 assembly polls.
In a subsequent tour, the former BJP president held similar meetings in North Maharashtra, Marathwada and Western Maharashtra.
In 2019, the BJP had won 29 of the 44 assembly seats it contested in Vidarbha. The saffron party had bagged 44 assembly seats in the eastern Maharashtra region, which elects 62 MLAs, in 2014.
However, the national party performed poorly in Vidarbha in this year's Lok Sabha elections, winning just two of the 10 seats in the region, where its main rival Congress has shown signs of a resurgence. In Maharashtra, the BJP is part of the ruling Mahayuti, which also consists of the NCP and the Shiv Sena.
