Making sense of the BJP’s membership drive

On 19 September 2024, Mahesh Langa, senior journalist with the Hindu, reported that the BJP’s membership drive in Gujarat was rife with fraudulent enrolments.

In the first week of October, Langa was detained for an alleged GST scam. Langa said he had nothing to do with the firm in which his wife was a silent partner, but he was remanded to police custody for 10 days.

Ahmedabad-based Langa is known for his unsparing criticism of the BJP. His most recent exposé revealed that the party was ‘enrolling’ members without their consent or knowledge. Kamleshbhai Thumar, for instance. A resident of Junagarh in Gujarat, he was admitted to Dasji Bapu charitable hospital in Rajkot for a cataract surgery.

At 11.00 pm, he was woken up by a man asking for his mobile number. The same man approached every in-patient, with the same request. Most obliged. Soon after, they all received OTPs with the message that they were about to become members of the BJP. Thumar recorded a two-minute video of this ‘recruitment’, which went viral on social media. Unknown to them, over 250 in-patients had become BJP members overnight.

Langa’s report also mentioned a couple in Visnagar who visited the civil hospital for an anti-rabies vaccine. Before the wife could get her shot, they were asked to share an OTP, as per “new regulations”. And voila! Prakashben Darbar had become a primary BJP member. Her husband objected, questioning the sneaky enrolment without consent, but his protests fell on deaf ears.

AAP legislator Chaitar Vasava told Langa that officials were asking MGNREGA workers to become BJP members. He reported that Mukesh Nimawat, principal of Kumari M.R. Gardi Vidyalaya in Surendranagar district, had instructed a teacher to message all parents to send their mobiles to the school with their kids. Before they knew it, they had all become BJP members. Photographs were circulated of class 9 students holding the tricolour as they ‘joined the BJP’.

The district education officer issued a show-cause notice to the school, which claimed mobile phones were requested only to ensure Aadhaar and ration card links. The principal put the blame on the students. The teacher concerned, Chandresh Prajapati, said he was following the principal’s orders. Since then, similar reports have surfaced in other states as well.

Membership drives are fairly routine affairs for political parties. What makes the BJP’s sakriya sadasyata (active membership) drive dubious is the simultaneous grandstanding and subterfuge. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah have to become ‘active members’ of the BJP all over, you wonder what’s going on. Were they not members of the BJP already? What does it even mean in their case to ‘renew’ membership? And what’s with the photo-ops?

Likewise with the use of external agencies, commercial firms and government employees; the emphasis on record targets and the suspicion of large amounts being paid, all of which suggest a curious desperation to jack up already large membership numbers. A BJP leader in Bhavnagar was reported to have asked workers to bring in 100 new members, with a reward of Rs 500 for each enrolment.

Is it simply about inflating numbers? Or a money-laundering strategy to pass off receipts as donations? Nobody really knows. The membership drive that started on 1 September and ended on 15 October is said to have enlisted over 10 crore new members against a declared target of 8 crore, a success rate of 125 per cent.

But hold on. Didn’t the BJP already have 12 crore members? With the addition of 10 crore members, it now boasts a total of 22 crore members which — brace yourself — constitutes 23 per cent of the 96.9 crore registered voters in the country.

According to Election Commission of India data, as many as 64.2 crore are said to have exercised their franchise during the 2024 general elections. The BJP received 37.4 per cent of the total votes polled. That comes to 23.6 crore votes, almost twice the number of members claimed by the party before the recent membership drive. Does that mean every BJP member in September 2024 (i.e. including those who hadn’t yet been enrolled) voted for the BJP in the general election?

Two crore new members were added in Uttar Pradesh alone, claimed chief minister Yogi Adityanath in a social media post on 16 October. “Over two crore people have already joined the party as primary members… positioning UP as the leading contributor in the country,” state BJP president Bhupendra Chaudhary said in a statement.

As per figures available after the 2016 membership drive, the BJP already had 1.83 crore members in Uttar Pradesh alone, said Govind Narain Shukla, chairman of the UP BJP membership drive committee. That was why the target was raised to over 2 crore this year. The party also had one lakh active members in UP, Shukla claimed.

The cumulative aggregate number of BJP members in UP now stands at 3.8 crore. In the 2022 assembly elections, the BJP received 3.8 crore votes with a vote share of 41.3 per cent of total votes polled. What the numbers tell us — apart from the glaringly obvious — is that three lakh current BJP members did not vote for the party in 2022.

BJP leaders have shown a great desperation to meet their targets. Reports claim mobile numbers were collected from eateries and vegetable vendors. Former Madhya Pradesh health minister Ajay Bishnoi revealed that he received three calls on 15 October from the same mobile number, asking whether he wanted to enlist the services of an agency to meet his quota — for a fee, of course.

"It is obvious that a number of BJP leaders have been hiring such agencies to create their bank of members and enhance their stature in the party," Bishnoi wrote, lamenting that old leaders like him were helpless in the face of such a "sharp decline in the morals of BJP leaders".

The state BJP lodged a complaint with CID branches in Bhopal and Indore, terming this incident the handiwork of miscreants ‘out to defame the party’ and demanded an investigation. Don’t miss the irony that Madhya Pradesh has been under BJP rule for over 20 years now.

Congress MLA from Jaura Pankaj Upadhyay, state secretary Jasvir Singh and former minister Lakhan Ghanghoria also filed an FIR stating that they had received messages from BJP leaders confirming the membership they never applied for!

Several BJP leaders from Uttar Pradesh privately called the membership drive a farce. “Half the new members are the same ones that got enlisted in the 2016 drive, albeit with new mobile numbers,” a senior leader said.

Another leader claimed that party posts were on sale. “You have to shell out a price depending on the importance of the post. A district kisan morcha office bearer, for example, is on offer for a few thousand rupees while the president or state office bearer’s post goes for several lakhs,” he claimed.

Some insiders worry about the drive weakening the party from within. Others are blasé: “Who needs an organisational structure when people in most parts of the country are voting for one person and booth-level organisation is handled by the same ‘sister concerns’ every election?”