The membership mantra

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah announced on April 30 that the BJP is now the largest political party in the world with more than 10 crore members, surpassing the Communist Party of China’s 8.3 crore members. The BJP’s membership drive via telephone calls began on November 1, 2014, when the party’s supporters had to give a simple ‘missed call’ to a designated number to get enrolled in the party. The membership drive has now entered the second phase, in which all personal details of the recruited members are being collected.

But the increase in membership has not yielded(return,देना) the party any electoral benefits. The BJP had more members in New Delhi during the 2015 Assembly elections than it did in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Yet, it polled a smaller share of votes in 2015 than it did in 2014. The Hindu Business Line reported that the BJP polled approximately 29 lakh votes in the 2015 Assembly elections even though it purportedly had more than 40 lakh party members living in the city. In West Bengal, in the recently concluded local body polls, the party polled less votes than its membership total of 42 lakhs. This suggests that the BJP’s members are not voting for the party.

However, this is not restricted to the BJP alone. During our fieldwork in the 2012 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, Congressmen in the State complained that the votes polled were fewer than the number of primary members of the party in their constituency.

Organisational benefits?

If its members are not all voting for the party, why is the BJP paying so much importance to its membership drive? Will these members bring organisational benefits to the party? The Congress’s history can help provide an answer. During the 1950s and 1960s, membership in the Congress increased when the party held its organisational elections. In 1960, the Congress had 47 lakh primary members. In 1961, a year before the elections were to be held, the number doubled to 95 lakh. But it dropped to 27 lakh in 1963. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mr. Shah are, therefore, probably aware that the membership drives led by ‘missed calls’ do not add anything substantial to the organisational core of a party. The individuals who are giving ‘missed calls’ to the party are not automatically becoming active members, that is, members who work for the party for at least seven days and induct at least another 100 people into the party.

So why is there a thrust on this membership drive? In our view, it may be part of an effort to create a centralised voter database with the mobile numbers of potential voters, through which the party will be able to reach voters directly with campaign material and text messages. It will also be less dependent on ground-level functionaries to mobilise votes for it. This is a grand experiment.

But will the strategy work? To win elections, a party needs initiative at the ground level. Take the Delhi elections, for instance. Political commentators have attributed the BJP’s poor performance in Delhi to several reasons: voters have voted differently in national and State elections; the Aam Aadmi Party’s chief ministerial candidate was more popular than the BJP’s; too much power was concentrated in the hands of one party; the BJP was propagating rightwing politics.

We believe that the BJP’s vote share in Delhi declined between May 2014 and February 2015 because the party failed to match its own mobilisational efforts during the Lok Sabha elections. Data show that the party managed to retain its core vote share in Delhi, even while the Congress and smaller parties collapsed. A large number of voters supporting these parties during the 2013 Assembly elections voted for the BJP during the Lok Sabha elections, but shifted towards the AAP in 2015.

Many people we spoke with said that the BJP made efforts to mobilise voters by contacting citizens individually during the Lok Sabha elections, but no such effort was made in the campaign to the Assembly elections. The AAP, on the other hand, not only managed to match the BJP’s voter mobilisation efforts, but also surpassed it in some senses. The Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies data clearly suggest that the AAP reached out to more voters than the BJP through canvassers(poll taker,मतदान सर्वेक्षक), recorded telephonic messages, and text messages.

As the graphic shows, the AAP had a clear advantage over the BJP among the respondents who did any kind of mobilisational work such as participating in rallies, canvassing, donating money, or distributing pamphlets. While the AAP managed to attract 45 per cent of such individuals to participate in elections rallies and processions, the BJP managed to attract only 33 per cent. Similarly, while the AAP had 48 per cent of such respondents engaging in door-to-door canvassing and 51 per cent distributing pamphlets, the BJP had the support of only 36 per cent and 30 per cent of such respondents, respectively. There were also twice as many individuals donating money for the AAP as for the BJP.

Convincing floating voters

Why is ground-level mobilisation so crucial in winning elections? Recent research by Harsh Shah shows that there are many undecided/floating voters in most constituencies in India and mobilisers play a huge role in convincing them to vote for a particular party. The foot soldiers associated with the BJP fell short on this count in Delhi, and a large portion of floating voters shifted en masse to AAP. There is ample evidence to show that vote mobilisers are capable of both increasing the turnout and vote share of their party. The NES 2014 data by Lokniti-CSDS clearly suggest that during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had more mobilisers on the ground than any other party. Many reporters have documented the mobilisational efforts of panna prabharis (persons responsible for mobilising voters listed on a single page of the voters’ list) during the Lok Sabha elections.

The message is quite clear for opposition parties if they want to check the rise of the BJP in their respective States in the upcoming elections: start preparing an organisational machinery that will not only withstand the BJP’s mobilisational efforts but also outperform it.