The first phase of polling for 87 of the 182 seats to the Gujarat legislative assembly is only eight days away. The party’s election in-charge Arun Jaitley, Gujarat observer Om Mathur and former state BJP chief Rajendra Rana, however, offered no new tricks to increase the attendance.

They only appealed to other members to do their best to ensure presence of more men and women on December 7 when some 50 more big guns of the party are expected to barnstorm the countryside.

Even when BJP president Rajnath Singh formally kicked off the saffron campaign on November 27, the sprawling meeting ground was half-empty. But yesterday, Advani’s meetings in Rajpipla, Pardi and Ahmedabad pulled in only a few thousands of enthusiasts — most of them party workers — despite organising popular traditional cultural programmes, sending shockwaves in the BJP camp.

At Rajpipla, where the former deputy prime minister had attracted 30,000 people in the past, there were only 2,000 locals to listen to Gopinath Munde’s speech last week, in spite of deploying tempos and tractors to secretly bring villagers to the venue to dodge the Election Commission officials.

While a powerful orator like Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who has been addressing three rallies daily, has also failed to draw a wall-to-wall audience, television stars like Smriti Irani who toured Saurashtra yesterday, could rope in only 200 people.

As one frustrated BJP leader told Khaleej Times, for the past five years, Modi has used the government machinery and sops to ensure jampacked meetings, giving no chance to the partymen to show their crowd-organising skills with the result that the saffronites have turned lethargic.