Lucknow: A large number of members, who had joined the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh by giving missed calls, have now gone ‘missing’.
During its membership campaign from November last year to April this year, the BJP in UP had enrolled 1.77 crore new members. The party, thereafter, launched a mass contact campaign to verify the memberships and enlist details of the new members and it is now that the ‘missed call’ members are going missing.
“When we are calling up the numbers, people are outrightly denying that they ever made a call to get party membership. What is even more surprising is that the numbers, in several cases, are journalists and bureaucrats who now claim that someone else may have made a missed call from their phones. We cannot force them to accept the membership and neither can we drag them to court,” said a party source.
During the membership campaign, the UP BJP had enlisted a huge number of ‘new members’ during train and bus travels verification of which is no less troublesome.
“We enthusiastically responded to the suggestion that we should initiate membership drive on buses and trains. But now we find out that most of them belong to other states, which mean they cannot be members of the state BJP and we have to strike them off the list,” the source added.
Adding to the woe, there are some numbers which are either permanently switched off or do not respond which makes verification a major problem.
