Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh rationale to guide new Bharatiya Janata Party members

The BJP has already claimed that it has added a record-breaking 10 crore new members in its ranks through the nationwide drive. These members were made through "missed calls" made on the mobile phones of every individual.

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BJP general secretary P Muralidhar Rao
BJP general secretary P Muralidhar Rao

The RSS ethos of standardisation and regimentation will be the guiding principle of BJP's upcoming mass training programme for its new members in one of the biggest political recruitment exercises undertaken in the country.

The BJP has already claimed that it has added a record-breaking 10 crore new members in its ranks through the nationwide drive. These members were made through "missed calls" made on the mobile phones of every individual.

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The new members would be taught all aspects of public life including the media-handling skills. The training curriculum would be standardised "from Kashmir to Kanyakumari". The party would also use all forms of IT-based communication platforms, including the visual medium of documentaries, slides and infographics.

A three-tier programme schedule has been devised to train nearly 15 lakh active members as the local face of the organisation among masses at the state, district and the mandal levels. These levels would correspond to a gradual increase in the depth of indoctrination. The idea, according to BJP's national general secretary P Muralidhar Rao, is to create the biggest disciplined cadre force. Rao is spearheading the programme.

In an exclusive interview with Mail Today, he said the BJP has not taken the traditional route of enlisting and training members through the established chain of command running down, rather a focused approach has been taken to convert the "overwhelming support base created during last general elections into a concrete cadre base".

"We do not want to become merely a 'missed-call party'. We need to convert the crores of missed calls into a concrete member base with whom we can connect that the grassroot level. We will be training the active members, 15 lakh in number, those who made 100 new members each. These active members are the masters of the party as they are the grassroot-level leaders, permanent sentinels of the party,our spokespersons and our face amid masses. This is why we need to train them to understand the core ideology of the party," said Rao.

The party would be sourcing its trainers from not just the BJP and RSS, but also its sister organisations to hold 11,000 to 12,000 mandal-level training camps, 700 camps at the districts level and as many camps as the states. "There could even be more than one camp as we have capped the attendance limit of each camp at 150 participants," Rao added.

"The two biggest challenges are the sheer volume to be trained and that to complete the training within three to four months," Rao said. He claimed that this would be the first instance in which a political party would have trained all its grassroot-level leaders in a curriculum that would be highly standardised.

The mandal-level training would be a 24-hour exercise in which the cadre would fraternise. "Issues such as history of BJP and Jan Sangh and core ideological aspects would be discussed along with governance ideals of BJP and its achievements. It is they who, after all, will have to see good governance at the village level," Rao said. At the district level, these political pupils would be trained in ideological issues such as cultural nationalism and integral humanism. For the state-level training all the local elected public representatives, such as MLAs, MLCs, corporators and ward representatives, would participate. Almost all important national leaders too would address these camps.