BJP membership drive from Sept 1, stage set for party chief’s election

The party top brass emphasised that its units — from booth level onwards — in these states should fully focus on elections and try to ensure the party’s victory through door-to-door campaigns, a person who attended the meeting said.

Elections in J&K will be held on September 18, 25 and October 1, and votes will be counted on October 4, the EC announced Friday. The poll panel also announced the schedule for the Haryana Assembly elections — polling on October 1 and counting on October 4.

Patra said the party is eyeing 10-crore plus members in this drive, and that people could become members through different mediums like a missed call, QR code, through the Namo app or through the party’s website.

In between, nationwide workshops on the membership drive will be held to apprise party workers about it, said a participant in the meeting. BJP national general secretary Vinod Tawde will be the convenor of the drive and party’s vice president Rekha Verma the co-convener, Patra said.

Organisational polls

The drive will be the precursor to organisational elections from the local committees to the Mandal, district, regional and state levels.
The presidents elected at each level will form their own teams of office-bearers.

According to the BJP’s constitution, once half the state presidents are elected, the party president’s election will be due.

There have been very few instances when there was more than one candidate in the fray for the post of state president. This happened once in Uttarakhand when the candidate supposed to be the “official” one bowed out, and the challenger became the state president because of greater support in the electoral college.

However, when it comes to the national president — who can have a maximum of two consecutive terms of three years each — there has never been a contest for the post in the BJP since its inception in 1980.

There is a buzz in the party that a working president will be named within August, before an RSS coordination meeting with affiliated organisations in Kerala’s Palakkad towards the month-end — though nothing is official yet. If this happens, working president — expected to be a person acceptable to both the BJP and the RSS leadership — will most likely become the full-time party president in some months.