B'day gift: BJP minority membership drive gets `good' response

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Ahmedabad: The Gujarat BJP Minority Cell on Tuesday launched a drive to woo Muslims on the birthday of the party's Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and claimed to have received "good response" with nearly 40,000 members from the community expressing willingness to join the party.
"We have received a good response to the membership drive initiated on the birthday of Narendra Modi. Close to 40,000 Muslims have expressed willingness to join the party," State BJP Minority Cell President Mehbubali Bava told PTI.
BJP aims to enrol one lakh new members each under its different cells starting from today, which is the 64th birthday of the Gujarat Chief Minister. Cells dealing with minorities, SC/ST, youth and cyber, among others, have been given the target to enrol one lakh people each during the nine-day drive, party leaders said.
Attributing the rise in membership to dissemination of "correct" information to public through various medium, Bava said "Congress has ruled the country for a major period since Independence. Still, according to Rajendra Sachar Committee report handed over to the Manmohan Singh government in 2006, only 2 per cent Muslims are in government jobs, 40 per cent live in slums and hundreds of them are languishing in jails."
"Instead of ensuring employment opportunities for Muslims and better standard of living for the community, the Congress has only sought the votes of Muslims by polarising the nation," he said in BJP office here flanked by scores of Muslims who joined the party today. Gujarat Police Department has 10.6 per cent Muslim personnel.
This was higher than that of West Bengal, Assam and Maharashtra where the percentage of Muslims in total population is higher than BJP-ruled Gujarat, Bava said.
Muslims comprise 9 per cent of Gujarat's population. Praising Modi for ensuring peace in the state in the last 11 years, he said Gujarat has witnessed "curfew-less" peace for over a decade.
"Modi has shown development and peace can take place simultaneously. Gujarat has developed immensely under his rule and it has also not witnessed a single incident of communal riot in the last decade. The scenario was different when Congress was in power here," he added.