The West Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has enrolled four million members till January 3 during the party’s membership drive in the state, senior leaders said, adding that the deadline for the drive has now been extended till January 10 to get more enrolments.
The drive, which was supposed to end on November 30, was earlier extended by a month. The Bengal BJP had registered 10 million members during the last six-yearly drive in 2018.
“The deadline has been extended again till January 10. We hope to take the number to five or six million by then,” Bengal BJP’s chief spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya told HT on Sunday.
“The figures were reviewed on Saturday at an internal meeting held in Kolkata by BJP national general secretary Sunil Bansal. He also discussed organisational elections to be held across Bengal after the membership drive ends. The party wants to set up committees for every polling booth in view of the 2026 assembly polls,” said a BJP leader.
“Only around 2.6 million members were enrolled through the new online process till mid-December, but the last leg witnessed good response from people in north and south Bengal districts bordering Bangladesh. Nadia district has recorded the highest enrollment,” said the leader who did not wish to be named.
{{/usCountry}}“Only around 2.6 million members were enrolled through the new online process till mid-December, but the last leg witnessed good response from people in north and south Bengal districts bordering Bangladesh. Nadia district has recorded the highest enrollment,” said the leader who did not wish to be named.
{{/usCountry}}In terms of electoral constituency, Nadia district’s Ranaghat North-East assembly segment represented by BJP’s Asim Biswas and South Dinajpur district’s Balurghat Lok Sabha constituency represented by BJP state president and Union minister of state Sukanta Majumdar have recorded the highest enrollments.
Darjeeling Lok Sabha constituency, where the party has won four times in a row since 2009, got only 25,000 enrolments in two months. “Darjeeling people become politically active only during elections. They remain aloof otherwise,” Samik Bhattacharya said.
“More than the numbers, it is the transparency in the enrollment process that has made us happy,” Sukanta Majumdar said.
The membership drive should be the BJP state unit’s prime objective, Union home minister Amit Shah had said in Kolkata on October 27.
“Our biggest goal now is to set up a BJP government in Bengal in 2026. I am saying we will cross the 10 million-mark. This drive in other states means strengthening our organisation but in Bengal it is a mission to end infiltration, rampant corruption, cattle smuggling and insult of women” Shah had said at the event.
With eyes on the 2026 elections, both the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the BJP wanted to utilise the October-November festive season to recover their lost ground. With educational institutions and offices closed because of the annual puja holidays, the TMC held more than 600 Bijaya sammilani events (community feasts at the end of Durga puja) while the BJP focused on its six-yearly membership drive.
In 2019, the BJP won 18 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats, in a record performance by the party. In the 2021 state polls, the BJP won 75 of the state’s 294 assembly seats while the TMC bagged 215. In last year’s Lok Sabha polls, the TMC bagged 29 seats while the BJP went down from its 18 to 12. The Congress, which won only two seats in 2019, lost former state president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury’s Berhampore constituency.
TMC leaders scoffed at the BJP’s membership drive.
“BJP is good at making tall claims. How does it lose one election after another if it enjoys mass support? People are always with Mamata Banerjee because of her successful development policies,” TMC state general secretary Kunal Ghosh said.