Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan (centre) addresses the meeting in Patna on Sunday as Nand Kishore Yadav and Mangal Pandey look on. Picture by Ashok Sinha

Senior BJP leaders, attending the concluding day’s programme of the party’s executive meeting on Sunday, urged workers to be ready for Assembly elections.

On Saturday, the leaders had set a mission of bagging 175-plus seats in the Assembly elections with focus on 5S-es — sangharsh (struggle for people), samarpan (commitment to state growth), sushasan (good governance for growth), sarkar (government for people’s welfare) and seva (service to people at the bottom of society).

Senior BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi said: “Development in Bihar can be attained only if there is an NDA government in the state too. Then only there could be better co-ordination between the two governments at the Centre and in the state.”

Coming down heavily on the JDU government, Modi said after the break-up of the alliance between the JDU and the BJP, all development work in the state had come to a standstill, as the economic growth of the state is half than that in the previous year.

According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) survey, the growth rate (gross state domestic product) of Bihar was 8.82 per cent in the 2013-14 financial year as against 15.05 per cent in the 2012-13 financial year.

Urging the workers to get ready for the elections, Modi said the probable alliance of the JDU and the RJD was not going to materialise as neither JDU supporters nor voters would vote for the RJD and vice-versa.

Three Union ministers from Bihar — agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh, law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan — attended the two-day BJP executive meeting held at the Gate Public Library in Gardanibagh apart from party MLAs and MPs, including new entrants such as Monazir Hassan.

Addressing the gathering, state BJP president Mangal Pandey urged workers and party leaders to rise to the occasion and associate with issues directly concerning the people. The party has constituted a four-member team led by Gaya MP Hari Manjhi, who will visit the victims of the Aurangabad police firing.

Dharnas would be staged at the district-level on the issue of irregular power supply and anomalies in distribution of ration cards from August 5 to 7.

Moreover, over the next three months, the state BJP unit would carry out membership drive at the mandal-level from August 21 to 24 and a special membership drive at the district-level from August 25 to 28.