#dnaEdit: ‘Missed-call’ membership

Long gone are the days when party membership was a marker of the ideological and political commitment of party members. In the contemporary world of brittle electoral politics, party membership, regardless of ideology, is usually a ticket to upward mobility. Yet political parties continue to flaunt their membership numbers as an infallible index of their huge popularity and wide acceptance. 

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) recent tom-tomming of its massive membership expansion seems to be one more endeavour in this direction. Party president Amit Shah, launched the BJP’s membership drive on November 1 last year, describing Prime Minister Narendra Modi as ‘member number one’ of the party. The procedure of acquiring membership — that required no physical verification — however appeared suspiciously simple and even facile. A membership seeker simply needed to send out a missed call on a toll-free number and confirm details like name and address by replying to a text message. This novel membership drive ended yesterday. 

The BJP’s aim in this exercise has been to project itself as the world’s largest political party. And in achieving this end, the party needed to overtake the membership of the Communist Party of China. A goal the party has now achieved. Outflanking the 8.60 crore-strong Chinese Communist Party, the BJP membership has gone up to 8.80 crore, adding 5 million new members every fortnight since last November.

But amid the BJP’s self-congratulatory hype, serious questions have come to the fore: does the BJP’s projection of itself — as the world’s largest political party — make any actual difference on the ground? Can the massive numbers touted by the party leadership be taken as convincing evidence of popular endorsement of the party’s political/ideological programme? What has the party achieved through its frenetic and seemingly superficial membership drive? 

At a broader level, this editorial argues that the membership strength of a political party — at least as its quality stands today — does not signify either the party’s real organisational capability nor its programmatic acceptance.

Conversely, it is argued that party membership — more often than not — is driven by the cynical self-interest of those who choose to become members. People tend to align with one political bloc or the other on the consideration of how expedient their alignment  will be in accessing schools, jobs, protection, etc. The existing patron-client relationship between political parties and villagers in the countryside incentivises ruling party membership. The main glue is power. Predictably, ruling parties attract more members than out-of-power opposition parties.  It may be relevant in this context to recall the experience of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Interestingly, even as the CPI-M floundered in West Bengal and failed to strike political/ideological roots outside of the state, the party’s membership continued to gallop in West Bengal. Clearly, at the heart of this phenomenon was the CPI-M’s ability to reproduce itself in power every five years — an ability that endured for three decades and more. The CPI-M leadership which then flaunted West Bengal’s membership numbers as a marker of its popularity must have surely by now realised the hollowness of those numbers. Since losing West Bengal to Trinamool Congress and the BJP’s ascendancy under Narendra Modi at the Centre, CPI-M members have — in droves — deserted the party. In search of greener pastures, former party members have now hitched their fortunes to the Trinamool, or the BJP.

However, it’s reasonable to argue that the BJP’s membership is more intangible than the membership of any other political party. And the rub lies in the process of the membership drive. The idea of recruiting party members through missed calls seems more like an advertising gimmick than a serious party-building exercise.