The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) whose government in Delhi is completing one month on Tuesday claimed that its membership has crossed one crore. Addressing the media, AAP leader Gopal Rai said that the party had got 1 crore and 5 lakh members so far. “We have reached 98.46 lakhs membership on January 26. It was just 7 lakh before we started the ‘1 crore members before Republic Day campaign’. We have achieved our target. People registered themselves as members through mobile phones, SMS and missed calls,” he said.
AAP had launched a 1 crore free membership drive in the second week of January. According to AAP leaders, the membership drive will continue till the Lok Sabha elections. Rai admitted that initially when they announced this ambitious drive, the party was not confident of getting one crore members. He said that the most members were from the rural areas across India.
He also added that some miscreants tried to enroll fake names like Barack Obama, Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi, etc and stated that the technical team of the AAP has deleted such members. He also claimed that the AAP had not released such a data that it cannot verify.
Rai said that since it was impossible to scrutinse the background of all one crore members, the party has decided not to do that. “If somebody goes against the AAP principles, his/her membership will be automatically cancelled. Each member has a responsibility and nobody should indulge in anti-AAP activities or the activities against our principles,” he said.
He reiterated that there is no split in the party and the party will not comment on the next moves of its expelled MLA Vinod Kumar Binny.
Reacting to a question on President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to the nation in which he criticized the anarchism, Rai said, “the President knows who his intended target was. The matter is before the public”.
Talking about the Lok Sabha polls preparations, the AAP leaders said that the party had received more than 5,000 applications from the aspirants and the processing of application would take more time. “We thought that we would be able to come out with the 1st list of Lok Sabha candidates by January 20. We did expect that so many people will apply. We are yet to process more than 1000 forms,” AAP leaders said.
