CHENNAI: For the first time since he made his political ambitions clear, actor Rajinikanth invited functionaries of his fan clubs to his Poes Garden residence on Thursday and held a two-and-a-half-hour meeting.
It is learnt that he is aiming for an ambitious 1.25 crore fan-club membership before lauching his party, and has instructed secretaries of the 32 district units to speed up enrolment.
“He wants 30 members in each of the total 65,000 booth committees in the State. By this, we can get 19 lakh members and at least 50,000 active members. We already have 10,000 functionaries. If each of these 19 lakh members bring five to ten members, we can get around 1.25 crore members.
Such a huge cadre base will help us reach every nook and corner of the State when we launch the party,” said a functionary of Rajini Makkal Mandram who attended the meeting and spoke to Express on condition of anonymity. Both the Dravidian majors, DMK and AIADMK, are also claiming to have a membership of over a crore.
Rajinikanth enquired with each of the district secretaries about the status of enrolment in the booth committees and urged them to inform him about the ground reality.
“Only a handful of district secretaries said they have appointed members for 50 per cent of the booth committees in their districts. The rest said they could do it only for 30 to 35 per cent of the booth committees,” the functionary said.
While the fans were disappointed with Rajinikanth’s speech on Wednesday, during the audio release of his upcoming movie Kaala, the meeting at his residence was a pleasant surprise for them. “So far, we could post the photo with thalaivar (the leader). Now, thalaivar himself has posted our photos which were taken at the end of the meeting in his Twitter handle,” said a functionary. Rajini’s tweet said that it was a “constructive meeting”.
The fan club functionaries also denied that the actor was planning to hold any State-level conference at Coimbatore. The information was just a rumour, they said.