HYDERABAD: While BJP is witnessing an overwhelming response to its membership drive in districts, the party leadership is not happy with the way it was going on in greater Hyderabad limits. The saffron party leadership, which has been considering Hyderabad as a potential area to expand its growth in Telangana, has been given a target of enrolling five lakh new members in the city. However, to their disappointment, the party could so far enrol only over two lakh new members causing worry to the state leadership. Following poor response in the city, the party leadership has extended the deadline till August 20. A panicked State leadership recently called a meeting of leaders of all the 150 divisions of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and pulled up them for poor performance. BJP Telangana unit chief K Laxman was reportedly very angry with the wayward level leaders were carrying out membership drive.
“Our party leadership has great hopes from Hyderabad and you people cannot even enrol new members. We are asking you to enrol just 25 members in an award. Is this too much,” Laxman reportedly asked local leaders in a recent review meeting on a membership drive. The State BJP chief was surprised to note that only one worker could enrol over 500 members in the city. A majority of divisional party leaders have so far not downloaded “BJP4TS” App specially created for membership drive by the party. Of the 2,537 people who downloaded the App, only 141 are from Hyderabad.
Rains to blame?
With greater Hyderabad jurisdiction having about a crore population, the BJP leadership were expecting a large number of people to join the party, but to their surprise, it got a very poor response.
The BJP had so far enrolled over 10 lakh new members of the 18 lakh target given to the State. The Saffron party was under the impression that since strong winds were blowing in it’s favour in the country after abrogation of Article 370, a large people in the city would be voluntarily taking membership. But to their surprise the membership drive in the city is getting poor response.
However, former MLA M Dharma Rao, who is heading the membership drive committee, told Express that they were not able to meet the target in Hyderabad as their leaders were not able to take up membership drive here due to rain. “We lost about seven days in the month due to rain. We have given ten days additional time to our leaders to reach the target. I am hopeful that we will achieve our target,” he stated.According to him, there was good response to active membership drive. Last time the party had 8,000 active members, but this time it has already touched the 30,000 mark, he claimed.