New Delhi: The Delhi unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is caught in a peculiar situation — it has been unable to “connect” with around 30 per cent of its booth committee members, ThePrint has learnt.
Last year, the BJP had embarked on the ambitious drive to form 21-member committees in each polling booth of Delhi. The idea was to prepare for the municipal polls as well as plan ahead for the 2024 general elections. The job of the booth committee members is to hold weekly meetings with the general public and connect with them. There are over 13,800 polling booths across the capital.
“We had formed a 21-member committee at each polling booth. However, when an exercise was initiated to connect with these 21 members, it was found that there was some discrepancy in the mobile numbers that they had shared,” a senior BJP leader told ThePrint on the condition of anonymity. “In some cases, mobile numbers were non-functional while some numbers did not belong to the said member.”
The matter has been brought to the knowledge of the state unit, and a decision was taken to form a committee comprising general secretaries of the Delhi BJP — Kuljeet Singh Chahal, Harsh Malhotra and Dinesh Pratap Singh — to find out about the “missing” booth committee members and allocate their work to either existing or new members.
However, while leaders of the state unit confirmed that a booth-level drive is underway, they contested the claim that “30 per cent members are missing”.
“Data can only be shared once the verification process is over, so it’s not correct to claim that 30 per cent of the members are missing,” said a second BJP leader who did not wish to be identified.
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‘Verification a continuous process’
The central leadership of the BJP had asked all state units across the country to form a committee at each polling booth, as part of efforts to strengthen its network at the grassroots level.
“This drive is a continuous process and while every committee is supposed to have 21 members in all, some booths are minority dominated, and hence we are not always able to find 21 members. Some booths may have four members, while others could have 45,” said Harsh Malhotra, one of the general secretaries of the Delhi BJP.
“When the list is prepared, it is verified by our workers. As far as this verification drive is concerned, we are doing this as a regular exercise. There are times when phone numbers are not reachable, and sometimes people are busy. So, calling them ‘missing members’ is not correct,” Malhotra said, adding that the drive will continue till 30 June.
According to the second BJP leader quoted above, “sometimes people enrol and then they get involved in some other work. The data is not fake but we were unable to communicate with some of the members and hence are revisiting the list”.
“The verification process has started and we will check all the booths. This is a continuous process,” he added.
The BJP’s Delhi unit, in a bid to ensure that it doesn’t face problems in connecting with booth members in the future, has also decided to connect with the members through official social media groups and by convening regular meetings.
“We had formed a committee of 21 members that includes all sections of society, including women, and SC and ST community members. We have now formed a committee of three general secretaries who have been assigned specific districts (total 14) and asked them to go and physically verify the members’ details and update their information,” said Adesh Kumar Gupta, Delhi BJP president.
Each of the booth committee members are “panna pramukhs” in charge of at least 20 voter families, he added.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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