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The defeat in Delhi has also put a question mark on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s membership figures. The BJP, in a rare instance of introspection by a 'national' political party, has decided to be more exhaustive in checking the antecedents of its new members enrolled as part of its ongoing membership drive. The rigorous exercise will attempt at deleting 'fake' or 'duplicate' members.
BJP President Amit Shah had launched the party's membership drive on November 1, by making Prime Minister Narendra Modi 'member number one' of the party. All that a membership seeker required was to give a missed call on a toll free number, and then confirming the details like name and address by replying to a text message.
The drive is to continue until March 31, 2015. The target before the party is to cross 80 million members - becoming the largest party on the planet in terms of members, surpassing the Communist Party of China. On February 8, Shah tweeted the party had crossed the 50 million mark. If Shah is to be believed, the BJP has added 5 million new members every fortnight since November, and looks set to achieve its target.
However, the claim sounded questionable two days later when the votes for the Delhi assembly were counted. The BJP polled 2.89 million of the nearly 10.1 million votes polled in the elections. Its membership, according to party sources, had already crossed 2.3 million in Delhi by then. Many, both within and without the party, pointed out how few other than BJP members had voted for the party but failing to get even one friend or relative to vote for the party.
The BJP team responsible for conducting the membership drive, however, defends the membership numbers for Delhi.
"The figure of 2.3 million includes neighbouring cities like Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon and Faridabad," a leader claimed. Another senior leader, however, admitted that fine tuning was indeed required. The leader said the party will launch a second phase of the membership drive starting April 1, that will feature an exhaustive door to door campaign to reach out to all its registered members.
"The current figure of 50 million is of those who have given a missed call. We will now go door to door checking details of these new members, asking them to pay the nominal membership fee and then initiating each of one of these members into the party's programmes and ideology," the leader said. The BJP believes it has followed a "verifiable" process that will stand public scrutiny to enroll new members.
None of the six 'national' political parties make either their donation or membership numbers public. The Congress claims of its membership numbers have been found to be erroneous in the past, including such instances as enrolling several times the numbers as party members than the electors in a particular polling booth or assembly constituency.
Jagdeep Chhokar, founding member of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), said he didn't want to comment on BJP's membership drive as all six national parties were "hiding a lot of things", including details of political donations.
"The Central Information Commission, by its order of June 2013, had said these political parties as public authorities come under the ambit of the Right to Information Act. But all of them have refused to be a part of the RTI Act," Chhokar said, adding any claims of membership figures should be backed by verifiable details posted on party websites.
The six national parties are the BJP, Congress, CPI(M), Nationalist Congress Party, CPI and Bahujan Samaj Party.
BJP membership timeline (as per its own claims)
1 November: membership drive launched
11 November: 5 million
2 December: 10 million
5 January: 30 million
21 January: 40 million
8 February: 50 million
