Telugu Desam Party president and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu is an expert at making tall claims and setting fancy targets for the officials and also his party leaders.
On Wednesday, Naidu set an ambitious target for the party leaders to take up the membership driver.
While interacting with party leaders through teleconference from his Vundavalli residence, he wanted that the party membership in Andhra Pradesh should reach one crore by December end.
Going through his dashboard, the TDP president said at present 75,000 member were being enrolled every day and asked the party leaders to see that it crossed 1.5 lakh membership per day hereafter.
Well, there is nothing wrong in expecting that the TDP should get more members. But, the membership drive should be done in a systematic manner and the members should be genuine and the number should be practical figure.
Assuming that each TDP member has four members in the family and he or she can mobilise all their votes, the TDP should get four crore votes in the next elections.
As per 2014 election figures, the total number of voters in the state was 3.67 crore, of which 2.89 crore voters exercised their franchise. Assuming that the number of voters had increased by 30 lakh, the total number of voters would be not more than four crore.
It does mean, the TDP would be getting 100 per cent of votes, assuming that there would be 100 per cent polling.
Even if one were to assume that one crore TDP members would mobilise just two votes, it should be two crore votes for the TDP, which would be two-thirds of the total number of votes polled (assuming it is 78-80 per cent).
What about the other parties, then? Especially, the YSR Congress party also has a huge membership bank. Will it not get any votes? What about those who have got elected?
Interestingly, YSR Congress party also called for a similar programme last year called “YSR Kutumbam” with a view to enrolling into the party at least one crore new members, who were in the past beneficiaries of various welfare schemes introduced by YSR.
