Our short term plan for 2024 elections

We have resolved to campaign on the ground to defeat BJP in upcoming elections

https://codema.in/d/RFBWl1fe/join-other-civil-society-groups-to-campaign-on-the-ground-to-defeat-bjp-in-upcoming-elections

In last meeting we discussed the rationale for such a decision. We have to write down how we reached this decision and try to influence as many people/groups as possible to join in this effort.

The basic premises,

1. We are very close to emergency declared by Indira Gandhi - there are differences, which may make things easier or challenging. Like the possibility of using technology to organize a resistance is a good difference from those times. Though since that was an explicit attack on people's rights, there was no convincing required.

2. In a short time, we don't have much choices. If the opposition votes are divided that will be enough to bring BJP back to power. So we have to take an exception from our usual thinking all parties are corrupt and only an ideal party we should support. Consider this like a temporary, slightly better than what we have right now, and giving us some breathing space and time to build an ideal party in the long term. At the minimum we can remove anti-muslim/anti-minority and authoritarian rules and somewhat restore the civil rights. Though we will still have a long way to go to reach the ideal state.

3. So we need to come together as a united movement - including opposition political parties, people and civil society movements to defeat the BJP. We have to take this message to as many people and get this as strong as possible.

4. There was a suggestion to focus on BJP supporters, trying to convince them, which assumes BJP cannot be defeated. That is far from what the numbers suggest. If we avoid the opposition vote splitting that will get us a long way into defeating BJP. Also focusing on BJP supporters is psychologically draining and will need a huge effort. So instead focusing on unifying the opposition and people who already don't like the BJP has more likely success.

cc @Ravi Dwivedi @NLBRT @Aravinth Manivannan add any points I missed in the meeting. We have to clean up this text in a way we can share with people - having more authentic numbers focusing on individual states etc