The Bengal BJP has taken an organisational decision to start physically verifying the lists of booth and mandal committees that are submitted by district leaders.

The decision, sources said, was to ensure the grassroots organisations don’t exist “only on paper”, as was the case ahead of the 2021 Assembly polls, which the BJP lost in spite of campaign-trail claims of coming to power with “more than 200 seats”.

“We have decided to physically verify whether the lists of names, which come from the districts, are authentic. Our call centres will do it over the phone and teams from the state unit will visit the districts for a double-check,” said Bengal BJP chief Sukanta Majumdar, adding that if any malpractice was noticed, steps would be taken.

Mandal is one of the smallest organisational units of the BJP. The party currently has around 1,300 mandals across the state.

Sources said it had come to the notice of the party’s minders for Bengal — Sunil Bansal and Mangal Pandey — that district leaders had taken “undue advantage” of the fact that lists of committees they submitted often went unverified. “As a result, such lists often turned out to be bogus. While the state leaders were given the impression that the party’s organisation at the grassroots was strong, in reality, the situation was completely opposite,” said a party source, referring to the 2021 debacle.

“Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, new booth and mandal committees were set up. The lists were sent to the state office but weren’t cross-verified. Once the party — quite surprisingly — secured 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats, the need to check whether the committees actually existed or not became more out of the question,” they added.

Following the crushing defeats of 2021, sources in the saffron camp said they realised that whatever the reason behind its exemplary performance in the general elections may have been, organisational strength wasn’t one of them.

“We might have performed well in 2019 because of the anti-incumbency sentiment against Mamata Banerjee and her party. But our organisation wasn’t up to the mark. After our loss in 2021, we were only weakened organisationally,” said a BJP MP on condition of anonymity, explaining that the renewed effort at building grassroots organisations within the party from scratch was aimed at bringing coherence between BJP leaders’ rhetoric and workers’ ability on the ground.

Sources said the verification will be a multi-fold process. Initially, the party’s call-centre unit will ring numbers provided by the district leadership and verify whether the people named in the list actually existed and were active BJP workers. Then, zone observers will place a report on the committees formed in the zones they look after. The BJP has five organisational zones. Additionally, state leaders will also pay visits to the grassroots to verify the lists.

The call centre verification has already begun and about 10 per cent of the handful of lists they have received so far have turned out to be bogus, sources said, adding that a deadline had been set by the saffron leaders stating that all committees at the booths and mandals would have to be finalised by end-December. However, according to liberal estimates, around 25-30 per cent of these committees stand unfinished.

On Saturday, the Bengal BJP leadership met at the party’s state headquarters to discuss about setting up booth and mandal committees.