If Bharatiya Janata Party leaders in Uttar Pradesh are to be believed, Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak is more popular than CM Yogi Adityanath – to the extent that the former can inspire more people to join the party. Pathak, who joined the BJP in 2016, tops the list of 10 party MLAs who brought the maximum number of new enrollments under the national membership drive, according to a list circulated by the state BJP. Yogi comes second on the list. It doesn’t give any membership figures though. Why would the BJP circulate such a list? Why would the party want to embarrass the CM? Brajesh Pathak, an Amit Shah confidant, must be a happy man.
If you find it difficult to believe that Brajesh Pathak can score over Yogi, you need to look at the stories coming out of the BJP’s membership drive. At a hospital in Gujarat’s Rajkot, a man entered a ward in the middle of the night, woke up patients, took their mobile numbers, and made up to 250 of them BJP members, Dainik Bhaskar reported on Sunday.
At a polytechnic college in Madhya Pradesh’ Guna district, two individuals approached students after an AIDS awareness workshop, gave them a number and asked them to give a missed call on that number to get more information about AIDS. Students did that only to get a message that they were BJP members now.
To check how it works, I gave a missed call to 8800002024, the number advertised by the party, on Sunday. I got an instant message about my BJP ‘membership number’- 7096462816. I might be the last journalist to want to be affiliated to any political party but here I was – a BJP member, officially. Now, if I want to get my membership card, I just need to open the link given in the message and enter a verification code. If I don’t take the membership card, so be it. My membership number will remain.
‘World’s largest party’
It’s another matter that the party MPs, MLAs, and office-bearers are struggling to meet their membership targets. They don’t get any credit for membership through missed calls. They must get OTPs from a new member’s mobile to enter a referral code given to them. It’s only then that they get credit. That’s why these BJP leaders must find innovative ways to secure those OTPs, such as by promising the people houses under PM Awas Yojana, giving huge discounts on mobile stickers, assuring benefits of other government schemes, and so on and so forth. Many of them have, therefore, had to hire agencies and pay them Rs 50-70 for each member.
So, what is it about the numbers that the BJP has to make so much effort and resort to innovative missed-call methods? In 2014-15, it was about the arrival of Narendra Modi as the popular face and Amit Shah as an organisational wizard. The party membership had to reflect that. It was about the same factor in 2019, too. The numbers contributed to the building of the BJP’s image as an electoral juggernaut and an inexorable force everybody wanted to be associated with. The Opposition would watch in shock and awe as its MPs, MLAs, and other leaders found it safer to take BJP membership.
In 2014-15, when the Amit Shah-led BJP claimed to have enrolled 11 crore members, it became the world’s largest party, surpassing the Communist Party of China (CPC). Five years later, the BJP enrolled seven crore members and curiously, added that number to the 2015 tally, declaring the total membership number as 18 crore. The party was obviously convinced that no one of those 11 crore people who became BJP members in 2015 left the party or even died in those five years. If it was about being the world’s largest party in 2015, the party scaled a bigger height in 2019 claiming that the population of only seven countries was more than its members.
The BJP never made public the exact figures – state-wise, district-wise or Lok Sabha/Assembly constituency-wise. So, there was no way of checking those claims by at least matching the party’s votes with members in a particular constituency.
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A puzzle
In 2019, then-working president of BJP JP Nadda revealed the figure for one border Assembly constituency – Karnah in Jammu & Kashmir’s Baramulla. The party inducted 6,059 members in Karnah, he said.
In the 2024 J&K Assembly election, BJP candidate Mohammed Idrees secured 2,973 votes in Karnah. At least half of the BJP members in that constituency obviously chose to vote for another party.
The BJP’s membership numbers have always been a puzzle. In March 2015, the BJP had declared that it had become the world’s largest party with 8.8 crore members. Four months later, then-party president Amit Shah said 11 crore BJP members would be made partners in nation-building. At the national executive meeting in September 2017, Shah revised the figures again, saying eight crore members on the first day and nine crore on the second. Later though, Shah reverted to 11 crore at public fora, a figure that was used to take the numbers to 18 crore in 2019.
In the latest membership drive, the BJP has fixed a target of at least 10 crore members. One doesn’t know if the party will add the latest number (10 crore or so) further to 18 crore or to 11 crore, or treat it as the final membership number. The BJP leadership must be mindful of the growing membership of the Chinese Communist Party, which follows a very rigorous process of induction.
The CPC’s membership is likely to reach 10 crore by the end of this year, making it incumbent for the BJP to focus more on the missed calls if it wants to retain the tag of the world’s largest party. That’s no big deal for the BJP. The CPC aside, the BJP can’t let an impression gain ground that its membership tally has come down. Because it would be seen in the context of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity and also the BJP’s hold on popular imagination.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)