Following the Aam Aadmi Party's spectacular success in Delhi, where it assumed power over the weekend, the year-old organisation has seen a surge in its membership.
People from a variety of backgrounds are signing up. The latest entrant is Infosys's former chief financial officer V Balakrishnan, who joined on New Year's day. Last week, pop singer Remo Fernandes paid up his Rs 10 entrance fee.
Politicians associated with other parties are also expressing an interest. They include Kamal Farooqui, formerly of the Samajwadi Party, and Alka Lamba, formerly national president of the Congress's student wing.
For its part, the Aam Aadmi Party has held membership drives all over the country, capitalising on the momentum of its success in the national capital and with an eye on the general election due later this year. It says it wants to be the third largest party to contest Lok Sabha poll.
Given the enthusiastic response from citizens all over the country, this ambitious goal doesn't appear unreasonable.
Since the Delhi election, 3.84 lakh people have joined the party through its website alone, officials said. The party has held membership drives in Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Kolkata, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Gurgaon, receiving a strong response at most of its venues.
Yet the party's sudden success poses a problem. It will be a challenge to integrate its disparate members into a cohesive unit, ready to fight elections in a few months. Incorporating – and perhaps containing – the ambitions of career politicians who want to jump ship from other parties will be another.
While AAP can benefit from the expertise of professionals from a variety of sectors, what it really needs are members who understand how to build an organisation from the grassroots up, which is what helped the party succeed in Delhi.
AAP officials have made it clear that everyone is welcome to join the party. But how the new members will be deployed can be determined only after they demonstrate that they’re actually committed to the party and that they haven’t signed up on a whim.
Moreover, it isn’t clear whether some of the party’s high-profile entrants, such as Balakrishnan of Infosys, will actually be able to make the switch from top-down corporate hierarchies to the consultative democratic structure of a political party.
The experience of Meera Sanyal is instructive. She resigned as CEO and chairperson of the Royal Bank of Scotland, India, to contest the 2009 Lok Sabha election as an independent candidate from the South Mumbai constituency. She lost by a huge margin to sitting MP Milind Deora of the Congress.
Since then, she has travelled all over the country and lived with the beneficiaries of her non-profit foundation. But it remains to be seen whether her voyages of discovery will translate into electoral support if she contests the 2014 poll.
The only place where AAP appears to have faced some reticence is in Kolkata, where its spokesperson says it is being perceived as a niche and elite party.
This perception could spread if the AAP does not field candidates who can muster the grassroots support that its core group in Delhi so adroitly managed. They did so using social media, innovative branding and simple, door-to-door canvassing.
When it announced that the broom would be its party symbol, the Valmiki dalits, a community of sweepers, immediately pledged their support for the party. AAP put up the names of all its donors on the website, increasing the sense of involvement for people who had previously felt estranged from their representatives and the parties they supported.
It used social media and electronic media to drum up support in Delhi, where media penetration is very high.
Its volunteers reached out to all classes of voters the old-fashioned way, by going door to door. Even their manifesto was based on the responses they received during such exercises.
One of the party's slogans is 'Aaj Dilli, kal pura desh.' (Delhi today, the whole nation tomorrow). To spread their electoral revolution across the country. It will need many more committed middle-class volunteers like their Delhi core group, rather than business executives who are used to issuing orders to subordinates. After all, a country is much more complex than a corporation.
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People from a variety of backgrounds are signing up. The latest entrant is Infosys's former chief financial officer V Balakrishnan, who joined on New Year's day. Last week, pop singer Remo Fernandes paid up his Rs 10 entrance fee.
Politicians associated with other parties are also expressing an interest. They include Kamal Farooqui, formerly of the Samajwadi Party, and Alka Lamba, formerly national president of the Congress's student wing.
For its part, the Aam Aadmi Party has held membership drives all over the country, capitalising on the momentum of its success in the national capital and with an eye on the general election due later this year. It says it wants to be the third largest party to contest Lok Sabha poll.
Given the enthusiastic response from citizens all over the country, this ambitious goal doesn't appear unreasonable.
Since the Delhi election, 3.84 lakh people have joined the party through its website alone, officials said. The party has held membership drives in Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Kolkata, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Gurgaon, receiving a strong response at most of its venues.
Yet the party's sudden success poses a problem. It will be a challenge to integrate its disparate members into a cohesive unit, ready to fight elections in a few months. Incorporating – and perhaps containing – the ambitions of career politicians who want to jump ship from other parties will be another.
While AAP can benefit from the expertise of professionals from a variety of sectors, what it really needs are members who understand how to build an organisation from the grassroots up, which is what helped the party succeed in Delhi.
AAP officials have made it clear that everyone is welcome to join the party. But how the new members will be deployed can be determined only after they demonstrate that they’re actually committed to the party and that they haven’t signed up on a whim.
Moreover, it isn’t clear whether some of the party’s high-profile entrants, such as Balakrishnan of Infosys, will actually be able to make the switch from top-down corporate hierarchies to the consultative democratic structure of a political party.
The experience of Meera Sanyal is instructive. She resigned as CEO and chairperson of the Royal Bank of Scotland, India, to contest the 2009 Lok Sabha election as an independent candidate from the South Mumbai constituency. She lost by a huge margin to sitting MP Milind Deora of the Congress.
Since then, she has travelled all over the country and lived with the beneficiaries of her non-profit foundation. But it remains to be seen whether her voyages of discovery will translate into electoral support if she contests the 2014 poll.
The only place where AAP appears to have faced some reticence is in Kolkata, where its spokesperson says it is being perceived as a niche and elite party.
This perception could spread if the AAP does not field candidates who can muster the grassroots support that its core group in Delhi so adroitly managed. They did so using social media, innovative branding and simple, door-to-door canvassing.
When it announced that the broom would be its party symbol, the Valmiki dalits, a community of sweepers, immediately pledged their support for the party. AAP put up the names of all its donors on the website, increasing the sense of involvement for people who had previously felt estranged from their representatives and the parties they supported.
It used social media and electronic media to drum up support in Delhi, where media penetration is very high.
Its volunteers reached out to all classes of voters the old-fashioned way, by going door to door. Even their manifesto was based on the responses they received during such exercises.
One of the party's slogans is 'Aaj Dilli, kal pura desh.' (Delhi today, the whole nation tomorrow). To spread their electoral revolution across the country. It will need many more committed middle-class volunteers like their Delhi core group, rather than business executives who are used to issuing orders to subordinates. After all, a country is much more complex than a corporation.
