Concerns in BJP, RSS over party membership drive diluting ideology

BJP will face a challenge to convert these membership numbers into votes in its non-traditional areas of strength

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah on Thursday announced the end of an ambitious six-month membership drive, claiming the party now had 104 million members.

But there is disquiet within the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), at the party’s transition from a cadre-based to a mass organisation. Concerns have been expressed over dilution of the ideological moorings of the party by the entry of millions of new members who have little grounding in RSS shakhas and over the entry of ‘lumpen’ elements.

The BJP plans to engage its new members in programmes like cleaning the Ganga, Swachh Bharat and removal of manual scavenging. A party leader said the BJP’s organisational framework was strong enough to provide participation to new members willing to contribute to national development and purge those unsuitable for public work.

The party will launch a contact programme with the slogan ‘Saath aayein, desh banayein’ to engage with the new members.

Shah said party membership had increased threefold to tenfold in most states. The BJP’s next target is to select 1.5 million active members. Shah said the party would conduct workshops to make active members aware of its history and ideology.

The BJP faces a challenge of converting its expanded membership into votes in Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. These states go to polls in the next 10 months. The effectiveness of the membership drive was questioned in Delhi, where the party formally had 2.3 million members but polled only 2.9 million votes in February’s assembly elections. Today, the party claimed to have 4.13 million members in Delhi, but also said the numbers were for the entire National Capital Region.

To become a BJP member, people were asked to dial a call centre and reply to the text message that followed with their name, age and address. In 2014, the country’s total electorate was nearly 820 million and the BJP polled a little about 170 million votes. The party claims to have received over 170 million phone calls, of which 104 million became members.

The BJP chief blamed mass rigging for the loss in the West Bengal municipal elections and said the results would have been different if polling had been conducted under the supervision of the Election Commission. The BJP received nearly 25 per cent of the votes in West Bengal in the Lok Sabha elections, which dropped to nine per cent in the municipal polls. Shah hinted at a leadership change in the party’s Bengal unit.

On whether the BJP was likely to ally with former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi in Bihar, Shah said the party was open to all possibilities.