BJP president and Union Home Minister Amit Shah told party office-bearers on Thursday that despite its best ever tally in the Lok Sabha polls, the party had yet to reach its peak performance, exhorting them to expand organisational work in States like Kerala and West Bengal.
Mr. Shah was addressing a meeting of party office bearers, State unit chiefs and prabharis , and flagged off a new membership drive before the commencement of organisational polls.
To helm poll process
The BJP’s membership drive will be on from July 6 — the birth anniversary of Jan Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mukherjee — to January 31. But once a certain target is reached, organisational polls for booth, Mandal, district, state and possibly the national level can be undertaken. This underlined the possibility of Mr Shah constituting as party president till at least the Assembly polls of Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Haryana are concluded.
BJP general secretary Bhupender Yadav briefing reporters after the meeting said the party had set a target of a 20% increase in membership over its current stated count of 11 crore members.
He added that the schedule of the drive, under the aegis of former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and BJP vice-president Shivraj Singh Chouhan, will be announced in a few days and that the party’s organisational polls will follow the exercise. Party leaders Dushyant Gautam, Suresh Pujari, Arun Chaturvedi and Shobha Surendran will be co-incharges of the drive.
In his speech, Mr. Shah noted that he had made a similar observation about “peak performance” during his presidential address at the party's national council in August 2014 and has been proved correct with the party improving its tally of 282 seats by wining 303 seats in the recent polls.
He said the BJP strengthened itself in States like West Bengal, Odisha and Telangana during the last five years while maintaining its dominance in States where it had done well in 2014. In a similar way, the party will expand in new States in the coming years, he said.
