Data is king

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership is intrigued at the Congress' efforts to punch holes in its claims about the results of its recent membership drive. The people managing the initiative say that those who were doubting the membership drive - the Congress or "anybody" else - were not seeing the wood for the trees. Even if the BJP finds that 50 per cent of the new "members" were fake, imagine the quantum of data it would have gathered on people, which can be sifted to identify truly "committed" workers. The BJP is looking to recruit 1.5 million committed members across India, and is hoping to identify this set from its target of enrolling 120 million members.