Having grown as the world’s largest political party with a massive public following, the challenge which the Bharatiya Janata Party currently faces is from the regional parties, BJP national president J.P. Nadda has said.
Inaugurating the newly constructed BJP district committee office in Kottayam on Sunday, Mr. Nadda accused the regional parties of becoming dynastic institutions. “None of these parties pursue a national ideology, be it the PDP or the National Conference of Jammu and Kashmir, Shiromani Akali Dal of Punjab, or the Chautalas of Haryana.... Besides being family-based parties, they also remain neck-deep in corruption,” he said.
According to Mr. Nadda, BJP currently had a membership of about 180 million where as the Chinese Communist Party had just 90 million members.
“We have a following that we have kept and are working for,” he said, elaborating on the number of representatives the party currently had in governments at different levels. On the other hand, all other national parties had shrunk to States or regions and the Indian National Congress had become a bhai-behen party, he said, in an apparent reference to Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Vadra.
BJP State president K. Surendran and the party’s newly-appointed Kerala Prabhari Prakash Javadekar were also present on the occasion.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Nadda also presided over a meeting of the BJP candidates who contested the Kerala Assembly elections last year.
