Cong gets into intra-poll mode; enrolls 2.6 cr members via special app

In a significant move that paves the way for the election of a full-time president to head the Congress, the party has enrolled 2.6 crore members through a digital membership drive. This is in addition to 3 crore members who joined the party before the digital membership drive was speeded up by the Congress top leadership from the beginning of this year.

Congress party’s digital membership drive was carried out through a specially-created app that was downloaded by 6 lakh party workers to enroll new members.

In an exclusive chat with The Federal, Praveeen Chakravarty, chairperson of All India Congress Committee’s data analytics department said, “The digital membership enrollment has made sure that only genuine persons become members of the Congress party and each member is verifiable.” Interim president Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi are among those who have registered their party membership through the digital mode.

“Each member seeking to enroll through the digital mode has to provide Election Commission (EC) voter id card number, mobile number and other details. Party workers verified the voter id card number with the EC database and confirmed the mobile number with a One Time Password verification,” added Chakravarty.

Only photographs clicked through the Congress enrollment app were accepted. These standard operating procedures made sure that all enrollment was genuine, he added.

“Unlike previous years, this time, the CWC decided to implement the digital membership drive in addition to the standard paper membership process for the period 2022-27,” said KC Venugopal, General Secretary, AICC, in a statement.

No fake members

The digital enrollment drive has eliminated the possibility of fake members and the Congress now has a formidable database of genuine members, Chakravarty said. He emphasised that the digital system adopted by the Congress was different from the “missed call” campaign of the BJP, in which, the verification of the callers was not a pre-condition. This is the first digital membership programme in the 137-year-old history of the Congress, he added.

The Congress enrollment app, an android, was not open to the public for self-enrollment since it was felt verification would not be fool-proof unless there were proper checks.

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President election next

The digital membership drive was carried out all over the country except in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, Uttarakhand and Manipur, where assembly elections were held recently. The digital membership drive will be completed by Friday (April 15, 2022) midnight, except in these five states where some more time is being provided to conclude the exercise. The next stage is the initiation of the internal election by the central election authority of the Congress, headed by Madhusudhan Mistry.

Elections will be held at the booth, taluk, district and state levels for the election of AICC members. Then the new AICC would elect a new president. Rahul Gandhi resigned as Congress president after the party’s debacle in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Sonia Gandhi has been holding fort since then as interim president and there is a clamour to elect a new full-time president. Dissenting voices within the party have called for internal democracy and election of office bearers, including the president, through a proper process.

Chakravarty pointed out, “We now have a digital database and it will not take much time to conduct elections for deciding the next full-time president.”

South Indian boost

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Almost half of the new Congress members enrolled through the digital mode are from the south of the Vindhyas. While the digital membership was actively implemented in 20 states, nearly 55 per cent of the initial enrollments were from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka. Maharashtra was another big draw with nearly 12 per cent of the initial enrollments happening in the state, where the Congress is part of the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition. Of course, the final numbers will differ on the basis of enrollments in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.

QR code membership card

The digital membership cards issued to Congress members contain a unique QR code and will be used as voter cards for internal party elections. It will be easy to verify the member’s details by scanning the QR code, Chakravarty said. New cards have been issued to Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi.

An interesting sidelight is that the Congress Membership Android App has been downloaded 6 lakh times in three months, making it the “second most downloaded and actively used political party app” in the country. In the run-up to the election of a new president for the party, the Congress leadership announced a membership drive in November last year. Initially, it was decided that enrollment of new members would be done both by traditional methods, as well as the digital mode. However, the party leadership asked its office bearers at the beginning of this year to focus on the digital mode to ensure that membership was genuine and verifiable.