Chennai: The saffron party’s efforts to paint a larger picture on the political canvas is appearing to turn into reality and the BJP can now boast of increasing its cadre strength in Tamil Nadu and emerge as a serious contender in the Assembly poll next year thanks to party chief Amit Shah. In about six months’ time, the BJP has enrolled 40 lakh members through missed call alert and routine ‘paper’ enrolment in addition to the existing 10 lakh members. “Although the nationwide enrolment campaign began in November 2014, we started late after the appointment of state president was ratified by the party. Thereafter, a series of campaigns and door knocks in all the districts helped us to achieve this number, though our target was 60 lakhs,” says BJP state president, Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan.

Unlike the previous occasions where an active member remitted Rs 100 and renewed his or her membership, the party this time directed each office-bearer to enrol a 100 members and Dr Tamilisai has personally motivated about 5,000 persons to join her party. The BJP, silently suffering setbacks due to inadequate representation at the booth-level during elections, could not hope to have sufficient cadres to take up poll work and this “booth-centric” approach — an advice by Mr Shah — would make the BJP comfortably placed in taking on the Dravidian majors.

“We had encouraging response from the missed call alert campaign which ended in April. Our door campaigns and distribution of pamphlets also helped us in our initiative,” says Mr S. Mohanarajulu, BJP state organising general secretary. Mr Shah’s idea was to have 100 party members per polling booth and fixed 60 lakh members as target. “Give me the numbers and I shall ensure lotus blooms in Tamil Nadu,” Mr Shah had said while addressing a massive rally in suburban Chennai.

“As per information available, the new members are from diverse professions and youth constitute the most,” claims Mr A.P. Muruganandam, national Yuva Morch vice-president. “Many traders have also joined the party. In certain pockets, during our door campaigns, families which claimed to traditionally vote for the AIADMK, DMK or Congress said they had no objection if the youngsters in the family joined our party,” Dr Tamilisai added. On a few Communist leaders’ claim to get reply messages from the party, she said this could not be possible unless one gave a ‘missed’ call to the toll-free number.