Since 2012, he had been studying the switch of rule in UP from the Bahujan Samaj Party to the Samajwadi Party. He sensed the Other Backward Classes’ displeasure with the Akhilesh Yadav government’s decision to carve out reservations for Muslims out of the OBC quota, and exploited the sentiment. Having figured out that only 35 per cent of the BJP’s traditional supporters had actually voted in the last state elections, he focused on door-to-door campaigning at the booth level. He set up a 7-to-10 member management committee for each of the 140,000 voting booths in the state, and deployed 450 GPS-enabled mobile vans to carry the message to remote areas, where media reach was negligible. He personally covered 76 out of 80 constituencies. Most significantly, he insisted on Modi contesting from Varanasi so that the people of Uttar Pradesh get a sense that the prime ministerial candidate was from their state and would, in case he was elected, be close to them.