The membership drive of BJP's West Bengal chapter faced a shortfall of over 57 percent in the 10 million membership target set by the party's leadership, sources within the party have revealed.
Despite the deadline for the drive being extended twice to January 10, the party’s membership collection stagnated at just over 42 lakh.
The leadership of the saffron camp from Delhi, who visited Kolkata two days ago, expressed their dissatisfaction with the poor performance of the party’s Bengal functionaries, said a BJP leader in Kolkata.
“The figures were reviewed at an internal meeting chaired by our party’s national general secretary, Sunil Bansal. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the disappointing results. The high command aimed to collect 10 million memberships to establish committees in every polling booth in preparation for the 2026 Assembly elections. However, achieving this goal now seems difficult, as the membership drive has significantly fallen short of the target,” said the leader.
Bengal has more than 78,000 polling booths, and currently, the BJP has no committee in over 50 percent of them.
The membership drive, which was supposed to end on November 30 last year, was earlier extended by a month. Because the figures were not satisfactory, a further extension was made until January 10.
The Bengal BJP had registered 8.8 million members during the last six-yearly drive in 2018.
Only around 2.6 million members were enrolled through the new online process till mid-December last year, but the last leg witnessed good response from north and south Bengal districts bordering Bangladesh, said another BJP leader. “Nadia district, which shares a significant stretch bordering Bangladesh, has recorded the highest enrollment,” he said.
In terms of electoral constituency, Nadia district’s Ranaghat North-East Assembly constituency is represented by BJP’s Asim Biswas while South Dinajpur district’s Balurghat Lok Sabha constituency is represented by BJP’s state president and Union minister Sukanta Majumdar.
Follow us
