The ‘micro-donation’ campaign launched by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is not just meant to collect funds from the public, but has a larger goal of widening its base by reaching out to more people, party’s State convenor of micro-donations S. Muni Subramanyam has said.
The scheme that was launched on December 25, marking the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was supposed to be concluded on Friday, commemorating the death anniversary of party ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. The party intended to collect small contributions as low as ₹5 and a maximum of ₹1,000 to instil a sense of participation among its members and sympathisers.
“More than the money, the idea is to trigger discussion among the public on the Central government’s functioning and let the message percolate to the grassroots,” said Subramanyam, who is also State general secretary of the party’s SC Morcha.
The party has divided Andhra Pradesh into 929 regional units for convenience, which collectively have 45,920 election booths. “Armed with the voters’ list, every representative of the ‘Shakti Kendra’ (collection of five or six booths) was required to meet at least 25 voters and explain the Centre’s role behind the State government’s welfare schemes such as Rythu Bharosa, support for farmers, schemes for girls, support to Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), schemes for SC/ST/OBC communities and etc. This, we believe, takes the message beyond the confines of the party office and directly into the community,” he said.
The donations are made only through the ‘NaMo’ app to ensure accountability in the contributions received towards party fund, apart from promoting the mobile application. “Though the programme was to end on Friday, we intend to continue it further,” Mr. Muni Subramanyam said.
In Kadapa, where a collective of six divisions has been christened as ‘Annamacharya mandala’, the booth committee members read out the donations collected online till Friday. Kadapa district party office in-charge and Assembly segment coordinator G.S.T. Lakshman Rao, who hailed Upadhyaya for propounding the ‘humanism laced with spiritualism’ theory for RSS, said a token amount of ₹10,000 was credited into the party account as a tribute on the death anniversary of Upadhyaya.