Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah on Thursday said the BJP was now the world's largest political party with 10 crore new members."I take both pride and pleasure in informing that BJP has become the world's largest political party. We had kept a target of crossing the 10-crore mark and we achieved it," Shah told the media here."From Arunachal Pradesh to Gujarat and from Kargil to Kanyakumari, our party workers put in hard work to make our membership drive successful," he said.The party will now call off the "aggressive" countrywide membership drive, which notched up over 10 crore and 43 lakh people till April 30, and embark on a new phase of "Maha-Sampark Abhiyan" on May 1.
Aiming to establish person-to-person contact with the new members, the party will undertake a 90-day drive to reach out to them and train 15 lakh party workers."We would like to learn about our new members, introduce them to the party's ideology and train party workers between July, August and September," Shah said.He asserted that the BJP was among the few parties that practiced internal democracy and conducted organisational polls in a time-bound manner."There are around 1,600 parties in our democracy, out of which only a few have internal democracy... BJP is among them in which internal democracy is still alive," he added.Launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 1, 2014, the membership drive used a high-tech platform for people to become BJP members through the party's online or mobile phone programme.