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The BJP’s mass membership drive culminated on Thursday with party president Amit Shah declaring that with roughly 10.5 crore new members, his is the biggest political organisation in the world.
Shah, however, clarified that the huge numbers should not be linked to elections, after he was quizzed about the party’s disastrous performance in the West Bengal municipal polls and the Delhi Assembly polls before that.
At the BJP headquarters, the party had put up a screen where the numbers kept increasing with each passing second, presumably owing to the continuous missed calls received from membership aspirants.
The BJP has adopted a new software, whereby those wishing to join the party can simply give a missed call to a widely advertised number.
At 2.55 pm on Thursday, just before Shah addressed a press conference, the number of new members was 10.4 crore.
The number rose by a staggering 5,728 new members within just 11 minutes, signifying 520 new members per minute.
If the numbers are correct, the BJP ought to be the world’s most invincible political force. But there seems to be an anomaly. The party failed to win a single municipality in West Bengal, where it claims to have 42.4 lakh members.
Fair play The BJP president said his party would have indeed done phenomenally well if the elections had been conducted in a free and fair manner. “If the State apparatus was neutral and elections were conducted in a free and fair manner, we would have done well. I still maintain that in the Assembly elections, which would be conducted by the Central Election Commission, the BJP would do well in Bengal,” Shah asserted.
In Delhi, the numbers were even more intriguing. According to the BJP, it has 41.3 lakh members here. But in the Assembly elections held in December, the party polled just 28,91,510 votes, about half of the total members it claims to have.
Even if the number of active party members at the time of elections was much lesser than the strength recorded on Thursday, it still meant that the BJP members could not add one extra vote for the party.
“These numbers are not for Delhi alone. They are for the entire National Capital Region,” explained Shah.
Hypothetically, if one active member can add one more vote to the party’s kitty, the BJP’s 23 lakh members in Delhi at the time of elections could have taken the total number of votes polled to over 46 lakh. But it got just 28.9 lakh votes.
Additionally, Shah said the extraordinary numbers should not be automatically linked to the party’s electoral performance.
All for ideology “The membership drive is for the expansion of the party’s ideology, ideals and thoughts. It is not simply an electoral exercise and should not be interpreted that way,” he said.
Asked about how the BJP would verify the antecedents of the new members, he said there will be an intensive scrutiny and verification process followed by a training programme.
“Joining a political party is not a technological experience. Registering new members is only the beginning,” Shah said.
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