How Modi, Shah recast BJP's membership drive into a political juggernaut

In the Narendra Modi-Shah masterminded regime, organisational elections have acquired the gravity, authority and colour of a national or state poll

On July 7, when J P Nadda, working president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), convened a meeting of the chiefs, conveners and co-conveners of the party’s 19 departments, his thrust was on the ongoing membership drive, which started on July 6 and is expected to end on August 11. 

Nadda likened the “foot soldiers” who are enlisting members to warfighters and said they “mattered more” in the schema than those “leading from the front”. Nadda was quoted as saying: “When you are in a war, it is people holding up the combatants from behind who are more important.” The