NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) now states on its official website that the party established in 1980 is the largest political party in India. Turns out, the party has done better than that. With a record 8.80 crore or over 80.8 million members and counting, it has actually become the largest political dispensation in the world, dislodging the Communist Party of China with about 8.60 crore members from the top spot, to second place.
Sources said the party hit its milestone 8.80 crore mark on Sunday, 29 March, and the BJP with Prime Minister Narendra Modi as its mascot and strategist Amit Shah at the helm of affairs, expects its membership to cross 10 crore by the end of this month, only one day away. When it launched the ambitious enrolment drive in November last year, this is more or less what the party hoped to achieve. Party president Amit Shah will announce the final tally of members at the national executive to be held in Bangalore on April 3-4. The aggressive membership drive being run online and through the mobile phone network is Shahs brainchild. The source of the idea is his belief that a base of active members would be a means to consolidate the BJP’s freshly-achieved pre-eminence.
TOI reports that according to BJP sources the enrolment through missed calls is a huge improvement over the old practice where block-level functionaries would mention names of purported members to meet targets. However, the party leadership has no way of independently verifying these claims.
In the new scheme, the party can scrutinise registrations by calling back the numbers from where missed calls originated. The phone numbers also provide the party with a way to maintain ‘live’ contact with members to update them on developments and explain decisions as well as the context in which they are taken. Mobile phones are also viewed as vehicles for propagating the party’s policies and to counter the criticism of opponents.
BJP general secretary Ram Madhav last week hailed the achievement saying the party had added one crore members in the eight days starting March 15. The number increased steadily last week with another one crore joining. Shah is now using the membership drive to also measure BJP’s strength in states which are headed to polls later this year and in 2016.
The party’s ambitious, hi-tech online membership drive was launched by Modi on November 1 last year when he became a member by dialling a telephone number followed by Shah who became the second member.
“BJP’s 8 crore members crossed,” Madhav said last week, adding that the first 10 million were added in 30 days, the second in 22 days and the third in 13 days. He said the party added the fourth such unit in 16 days, the fifth in 18 days and the sixth in the subsequent 21 days. The last 20 million were added in 15 days and eight days respectively.
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