The BJP’s real membership target is 130 crore

Eighteen crore members and counting, why the BJP wants everyone to join the party.

File photo | BJP supporters walk past paper cut-outs of PM Modi during a rally | Photo: Prashanth Vishwanathan | Bloomberg

In about 10 months after Narendra Modi first became Prime Minister in 2014, the BJP announced it had become the world’s largest political party. With 8.8 crore members, it claimed to have surpassed the Communist Party of China.

You’d think this would be enough, but they didn’t stop at that. The BJP keeps doing its membership drives every now and then. When exit polls showed Modi was certainly returning to power in 2019, the BJP’s social media channels immediately started asking people to fill up online membership forms.

Last month, after yet another membership drive, the BJP announced it has now crossed 18 crore members.

One polling booth can cater to about maximum 1,400 voters. How many party workers do you think are needed to woo 1,400 voters? The BJP has a ‘panna pramukh’ system. There’s one worker for every page of the electoral roll, which has 60 voters. So, if the BJP needs one party worker for every 60 voters, it needs about 23 panna pramukhs per polling booth. Add a few more senior workers, and you could say a good polling booth might have 30 BJP workers. That’s a lot of party workers.

India has 10 lakh polling booths. The BJP says it has 18 crore members. That’s 180 people per polling booth.

Where is Tiwari ji?

Phulpur in east Uttar Pradesh used to be Jawaharlal Nehru’s constituency. I have been visiting a particular village in Phulpur every election since the 2012 UP assembly election. When I first went there in 2010, I asked the Congress worker what he thought the Congress should do to revive itself in UP.

“I am from a traditional Congress-voting Brahmin family. I have seen many political waves come and go, be it Mandal or Mandir, the SP or the BSP. I could easily have joined any other party, but I have stayed on with the Congress. In all these years you are the first outsider who has come and asked me what the Congress should do to revive itself. No one in the Congress from Delhi, Lucknow or even Allahabad has ever come and asked me this question. That is the problem,” he said.

Election after election, he sits around the dhaba at the chowk sipping tea, ruing he decline of the Congress party, openly admitting how his party has no chance again in the Lok Sabha election. But he wouldn’t leave the Congress out of a sense of familial association.

The same village had one lone BJP worker in 2012. The party changed the worker in the next election. In subsequent elections, I found out that the BJP changes its office bearers at even the lowest rungs every election. It slowly but surely transformed even the booth-level leadership from Brahmins to OBCs. When I went there in 2019, the number of BJP workers seemed to have swelled up. Everybody at the dhaba claimed to be a BJP worker. They were disgruntled as they had not been given leadership roles, but they were with the BJP nevertheless.

“Where is Tiwari ji,” I asked for the Congress worker.

“He is away at work, must be coming,” said one BJP worker. “Woh bhi idhar aa gaye hain (He has also joined BJP),” said another BJP worker. I was astonished. The man who took pride in not quitting the Congress all these years has finally jumped ship in 2019? What finally made him do it? It must have been a big shift.

Tiwari ji eventually arrived and sat with us at the dhaba amid the army of BJP workers. “Is it true?” I asked. “You’ve joined the BJP? How come? I thought you’d never leave the Congress? And why the BJP? What have they offered you?”

Something was wrong, I thought.

“For Modi ji,” he replied.

“What about Modi ji impressed you now that didn’t impress you earlier,” I asked. “Was it Balakot?”

“Since everyone is with Modi ji these days, so am I,” he replied.

“Come on,” I said, “You stayed with the Congress all these years. You never needed to be on the winning side. What changed?”

He finally spilled the beans. “Humein bhi is samaj mein rehna hain. PWD contractor hain. Samajh jaiye. (After all, I have to live in this society. I am a contractor with the government. You can understand the rest,” he said.

This was a new society in the making. Since the Congress party disappeared from UP in 1989, Tiwari ji’s business was never affected by his political affiliations. For the first time now, in the Modi era, he was faced with a new test to get government contracts. He had to say he was in the BJP.

The BSP worker on the polling booth is a Dalit who doesn’t speak his mind before the upper castes. So, I always take him aside to chat. He told me, “You know, Tiwari ji is lying.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“He’s still with Congress, in his heart. He’s just saying he is with BJP.”

Rent an office?

In the Gujarat assembly elections in 2017, I met the Congress candidate in Ahmedabad’s Vejalpur assembly seat. His temporary election office was on the ground floor of an under-construction building in a busy market area. Just having an office in this area was an achievement for the Congress. For many election cycles, the Congress wasn’t able to open even a temporary election office in the “Hindu area” of the constituency. If anyone agrees to rent out a space, they get calls from important people next day, and the rental agreement doesn’t get signed. And so, the Congress office was always in Juhapura, the “Muslim area” of the seat.

Before the 2008 delimitation, this seat used to be known as Sarkhej. Its three-time MLA was Amit Shah. But in 2017, when Amit Shah was no longer the MLA candidate, and the BJP was weakened by GST and the Patel agitation, someone dared to give the Congress temporary office space in the mainstream “Hindu area”.

The new Aadhaar card

What’s happening in Phulpur today, has long happened in Ahmedabad. The Gujarat model is being exported to all of India. One party, one religion, one language, one state, one tax, one election, one leader, and so on. The Congress worker’s words from Phulpur often ring in my ear: “I have to live in this society.”

The BJP may be exaggerating its membership numbers, but there is no doubt they have been swelling. These rising membership numbers are not merely part of the election machine. There is a much bigger game-plan here. The BJP is trying to fuse party, state and society together, just like the Left Front did in West Bengal for 34 years.

We should take Amit Shah very seriously when he says multi-party democracy is a bad idea. On that polling booth in Phulpur, there will be a day when even the SP and BSP workers will join the BJP. The BJP membership card will one day become as compulsory as the Aadhaar card.

The old slogan used to be, “Bharat main rehna hoga, to Jai Shri Ram kehna hoga.” The new slogan is, “Bharat main rehna hoga, to Modi Modi kehna ho ga.” If you need that translated, you are in trouble, because Hindi will soon be the national language of India. Start learning.

Views are personal.