Kerala BJP's membership drama falls apart

The BJP in Kerala faced a major embarrassment on Friday after it organised a function in Kochi to issue party membership to some close relatives of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and claimed that they were joining BJP from Congress.

But Tharoor’s relatives told media later that they had been BJP loyalists for the last many years and were surprised by the media coverage given to the event. They were invited on the pretext of a personal interaction with party state president P S Sreedharan Pillai.

The BJP is learnt to have made an attempt to create an impression that more persons from the Congress are joining the BJP, especially in the backdrop of AICC spokesperson Tom Vadakkan joining the saffron party on Thursday.

Shashi Tharoor’s maternal aunt Sobhana, her husband M Sasikumar and some other relatives were invited to the function at Kochi. All of them are settled in Kochi for several years. BJP state president Sreedharan Pillai ‘welcomed them to the BJP’ by draping party shawls around them.

After the event, the media sought the response of Tharoor’s relatives. Sobhana said that they had been BJP loyalists for many years now. And since they had never joined the Congress in the first place, there was no question of them joining the BJP from Congress now. However, the BJP functionaries immediately intervened and prevented them from talking further to the media.

With the BJP’s membership drama turning out to be a damp squib, social media trolls had a field day, saying the BJP Kerala unit may soon give party membership to Amit Shah and Narendra Modi.