BJP to focus on development, UP

A day after the first phase of Lok Sabha elections, top BJP leaders led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Wednesday reviewed the feedback on polling trends and decided on the focus for its next phase of campaigning.

"Our assessment of the trends are encouraging. We are comfortably placed. We reiterate our appeal to the people to give us a decisive mandate, a bigger mandate to help us accomplish many big tasks outlined in the NDA Agenda," party president M Venkaiah Naidu told reporters after the meeting in Delhi.

Naidu also appealed to the minorities, particularly Muslims, to give the party an 'opportunity once'.

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Besides Naidu, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani, Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley and party general secretary Pramod Mahajan were among those who attended the meeting.

Naidu later told PTI that the meeting agreed to focus entirely on development in the next phase of its campaign.

Asked whether there was a feeling that the issue of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin has backfired, he shot back, "When was it fired that it would backfire? You would see it in the course of our campaign."

Party sources said it was also decided to focus on the politically-crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, with the party deciding to depute top leaders to campaign there in the wake of the Lucknow stampede episode in which 21 women and a child were killed.