With an eye on a larger role at the national level, the Gujarat Chief Minister and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s nominee for prime minister Narendra Modi is set to make a rousing start to election campaigning in his home turf on Wednesday.

With just about a week to go for polling in Gujarat, Modi would keep up the spanking pace he has maintained so far, holding multiple rallies every day to cover the maximum number of constituencies by April 28. The State will go for single-phase polling on April 30.

Campaigning in the State is being considered crucial given that the party is aiming to make a clean sweep of all 26 Lok Sabha seats in it. Probably it is for this reason that three of the five public rallies scheduled for Wednesday will be held in Congress-held seats. Besides Surendranagar, where Modi will begin his campaign, these are Banaskantha and Jamnagar.

It appears that Modi doesn’t want to leave it to chance this time as he gets selective about the constituencies he will campaign in. Poll analysts see this as an attempt to gain ground in Congress strongholds. An example of this would be Modi’s plan to take on his bete-noire and Congress candidate Shankarsinh Vaghela at a rally in Sabarkantha constituency. The Sabarkantha seat is considered safe for Vaghela given the high number of OBC voters in the constituency. Interestingly, the Congress General Secretary and Modi’s opponent for the Vadodara seat, Madhusudan Mistry, had lost from Sabarkantha in 2009.

For the first time in this poll season, Modi will also hold a public rally for his mentor and BJP veteran, L K Advani, in Gandhinagar constituency.

Later in the evening he will address his fifth 3D rally, which will be seen at 100 locations across the country, including 15 parliamentary constituencies in Gujarat.

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