Lucknow/New Delhi: In a two-pronged attack to break the back of the primarily caste-based rivals Samajwadi Party (SP) and Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has initiated its second wave of social engineering in Uttar Pradesh.

According to sources in the Uttar Pradesh unit of the BJP, the party will organise six 'sammelans' of the major castes enumerated as Scheduled Castes (SC) in state capital Lucknow by the end of November. 

While the party is upbeat about the six massive gatherings — dubbed as Samajik Pratinidhi Sammelan — the actual plot is rather detailed. 

Uttar Pradesh is crucial to BJP' s plans to win the next Lok Sabha polls in 2019. In 2014, Uttar Pradesh had given BJP 71 out of 80 seats. It is here that the party faces the toughest challenge from the two regional behemoths, SP and BSP.

According to top party sources, two to three Dalit castes will be covered in each of the six planned meets. Local influencers among the concerned castes — who can and do sway votes at the booth level — will attend the gatherings. 

"We are organising sammelans of the Scheduled Castes under the aegis of our SC Morcha. These meets will help us reach out to them as we believe in sabka saath, sabka vikas," Uttar Pradesh BJP spokesperson Chandra Mohan told MyNation. 

On the OBC front, the party will organise a massive Prabuddha Sammelan of OBCs. Recently, the party had organised a massive meet of OBC representatives. This is expected to add electoral heft to the saffron outfit's plans.

Insiders believe that while the SP and BSP did not amass many seats in 2014 — five and zero respectively — their vote share remains sizeable. While the SP garnered about 22% of votes, BSP managed to keep it at around 20%. The new wave of social engineering by the BJP might once more not let this vote share convert into actual seats in 2019, they claimed.