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Journalism of Courage
Prime Minister Narendra Modi Monday set the ball rolling for BJP’s membership drive and asked party workers to enrol members from border villages and absorb more people from the 18 to 25 age group.
Modi said youngsters should become BJP members so that they realise “the bad days their parents had seen. There were corruption allegations. Even getting a telephone or gas connection was difficult.” He said that to expand presence in remote tribal areas, workers should go to those who got pucca houses after generations.
“Our border villages are not the last villages but the first villages of our country. We should start membership drive in those first villages. When these border villages become fortresses of the BJP, they automatically become fortresses of our country,” he said.
Asking party workers not to be apprehensive about losing ground within BJP after new members join, he said, “During the kalkhand (period) of the organisation that this membership campaign will build, the women’s reservation law will come into force. So, I will include those members who will be able to make more and more women MLAs and MPs.”
In a veiled reference to the Emergency, PM said, “There was a time when Jana Sangh or BJP workers used to have one foot in rail and another in jail. The rail reference was because our workers kept travelling… About 50 years ago, our workers were doing Satyagraha in Ahmedabad. A Jana Sangh female worker spent a month in jail for Satyagraha with a nine-month-old baby in her arms.”
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