Picture this. In the most crowded Daldalia Chowk in the inner city, BJP activists set up a small booth along with tables and chairs for its office-bearers. Shoe brushes were displayed on the table. No one even tried to touch the brushes till the BJP president arrived. When he did there were not enough brushes to go around. However, the enterprising few had their own brushes in their ‘kurta’ pockets to show off for the cameras.

One would imagine that with so many brushes many shoes must have been polished. However, that was not the case. Most of the BJP activists wanted to polish the shoes which the BJP president was shining or were content just posing for photographs with Mr Khanna. The show became a farce soon, with BJP activists even polishing plastic and sports shoes for the cameras.

The drive at Daldalia Chowk finished as quickly as it had started. The next stop was an equally crowded Arya Samaj Chowk. Here, Mr Khanna preferred to do only one shoeshine for the camera while urging his workers to collect money in tin boxes which were emblazoned with the party’s name. A few senior BJP leaders of the state and leaders of the party’s Yuva Morcha also preferred to stand beside Mr Khanna and were not involved in either shining shoes or collecting money for tsunami victims.

Mr Khanna, however, claimed that the party’s exercise had been very successful. “We were able to reach out to the common man through this fund-collecting exercise, with even rickshaw-pullers contributing money to the relief fund”, he said. When questioned on the money which had been collected by the party, he said Rs 1.14 lakh had been collected in Ludhiana and around Rs 1 lakh in Amritsar. He said the money collected in Jalandhar was still to be counted.

Onlookers said the drive did not have much success because of faulty planning. “The BJP could have called upon its front organisations to conduct a fund-collection drive in a planned manner and could have also asked its office-bearers and workers to donate for tsunami victims”, said Manmeet Singh, a city resident. “If this was done they would have collected much more than the around Rs 4 lakh target they are likely to achieve by polishing shoes all over the state”, he added.