Saints and other religious leaders associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad will visit villages across UP to campaign for BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.
The saints will visit every village in the politically crucial state of UP and contact as many people as possible and convince them to support the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.
“The 2014 Lok Sabha polls are crucial for the country. A mistake this time will prove costly for the nation,” lVHP leader Ashok Singhal said while addressing a meeting of the saints drawn from different parts of the state in Chitrakoot on Tuesday.
He said Congress has “ruined” the country during its rule and does not care for interests of Hindus. “The saint community must leave their ashrams and mutts and fan out to villages,” he said.
The VHP leader said there were thousands of saints in UP and they had a huge following. “Every saint should use their army of followers and ask them to support Narendra Modi, who alone can safeguard the interests of Hindus,” he added.
Singhal discussed the strategy to be adopted in the polls and said the saint community should take responsibility for the region, where they could prove to be effective. “The saints of Ayodhya can cover the entire Avadh region while the saints of Chitrakoot could take up the Bundelkhand region,” he said.
Earlier too, saints from Ayodhya had called for supporting Modi in the elections. In last year’s Kumbh, saints had held a meeting and declared their support for Modi.
The Avadh region that includes Faizabad, which was the epicentre of the Ram temple movement, was crucial for BJP in the polls. The party had lost the Ayodhya assembly seat in the 2012 polls to SP.