Donations from across the world may have successfully generated for the Aam Aadmi Party the Rs 15 crore or so it needed to contest the Delhi Assembly Election, but turning their nose up at funds from corporates may be tougher when the year-old party is looking to raise about Rs 200 crore for its Lok Sabha gameplan.
For the Delhi Assembly elections, AAP said it had collected about Rs 19 crore till November 8 as donations from 63,000 people, including a host of NRIs, each one's details duly recorded on the party's website.
The donations came from rickshawpullers to traders and industrialists, but all individuals. The sums ranged from Rs 10 to Rs 1 crore. A brief furore was raised by the Congress and the BJP in Delhi over foreign funding for AAP, but it appeared that AAP's books were clean.
The effort was inspiring enough for the Bharatiya Janata Party, fresh from the embarrassing result of the Delhi polls, to launch its own version of AAP's 'one vote, one note' election fund-raising strategy. Apparently, the motive was to reach out directly to people - about a 100 million - and initiate a people-driven resource mobilisation that helped build grassroots workers as well as a corpus.
Not long after, AAP sources said they were stepping up their funds collection and urged supporters to part with Rs.2,014 -- or more -- to mark the historic year of its first shot at national elections. "We will be contesting the Lok Sabha election in many states and we will need your support," a letter from the Aam Aadmi Party said.
About 5,000 people contributed that sum. In a fortnight, the party collected about Rs 1.6 crore with that strategy, said a report in The Times of India, though none of those efforts may be enough to raise Rs 200 crore quickly enough, it appears.
"At the moment, we are getting Rs 20-25 lakh in donations every day. But this is not enough. We will have to increase that many times over and are designing a funding structure," Pankaj Gupta, AAP's National Secretary, told Business Standard.
An awareness campaign by AAP workers. Naresh Sharma / Firstpost
Sources told the newspaper that 'big ticket' donations, or anything above Rs 50 lakh, from individuals including corporate head honchos, is the target now, though companies are likely to be kept out still.
Meanwhile, the party will once again hold a series of concerts and musical programmes aimed at spreading its message and gathering more supporters. Apparently inspired by the success of the 'Rock the Ballot' concert staged in the run-up to the Delhi elections, road shows, concerts in rural areas, tie-ups with local college bands and folk artistes are on the cards in the coming months, according to a report in The Economic Times.
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