New Delhi: The BJP may have notched up its best ever tally in the recent Lok Sabha polls but it is yet to reach its peak, party president Amit Shah asserted Thursday. He also asked key party leaders to expand the organisation in new regions and bring more people into its fold.
Chairing a meeting of the party’s national office-bearers and its key organisational representatives from various states, Shah said the party will reach its zenith when it will be running governments in states like Kerala and West Bengal, among others.
Shah also gave final touches to the party’s membership drive, which will be launched soon with an aim to increase its members by 20 per cent, BJP general secretary Bhupender Yadav told reporters.
Yadav said the schedule of the drive, whose in-charge will be former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and BJP vice-president Shivraj Singh Chouhan, will be announced in a few days and that the party’s organisational polls will follow the exercise. Dushyant Gautam, Suresh Pujari, Arun Chaturvedi and Shobha Surendran will be co-incharges of the drive.
Shah, party sources said, will continue as its national president till the organisational elections are over. The entire exercise may take several months, which means that the party may fight Assembly elections in three states – Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra – later this year under Shah.
In his address at the meeting, Shah told party leaders that the Narendra Modi government’s return to power with a massive mandate mark the victory of the BJP’s agenda of nationalism, good governance and welfare of the poor.
Shah said the BJP strengthened itself in states like West Bengal, Odisha and Telangana during the last five years while maintaining its dominance in states where it had done well in the last general elections. However, he urged workers to increase the presence of the party in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh – where the saffron party had failed to open its account.
Meanwhile Yadav said Shah credited the hard work of crores of party supporters at the booth level for the BJP getting more than 50 per cent vote share in 220 seats in the recently-concluded Lok Sabha elections.
The BJP has claimed that it had 11 crore people as its members during its 2014 drive. The party has now set a goal of increasing the number to 14 crore.
PTI