Parties tweet, plaster their walls with posts to woo middle class

They pat their own back on social media, maul one another

The nominees of three big parties in the city – BJP, AAP and Congress – are getting more and more active on their Facebook pages and Twitter handles. 

For AAP, the memory of the Delhi Assembly election debut is still fresh. That success has been attributed not just to the party’s door-to-door electioneering, but also its Twitter campaign.

The Facebook page of the party’s East Delhi nominee Rajmohan Gandhi’s was started barely two weeks ago and already has more than 3,000 likes. Text, photo and video posts about him and his campaign, coupled with the multiplier effect of social media, ensure more reach to voters for the scholar-turned-prospective MP.

The Twitter handle of AAP’s state unit ‘AAP_DelhiNCR’ runs digital campaign for its Lok Sabha nominees from Delhi. All their candidates are also diligently retweeted. In a short span of time, the party has over 4,200 followers. 

The BJP state unit has a larger support base on Twitter with over 26,300 followers. But Congress is yet to intensify its campaign on Twitter. The party has just over 800 followers. 

The candidates from New Delhi constituency – BJP’s Meenakshi Lekhi, AAP’s Ashish Khetan and Congress party’s Ajay Maken – have turned avid ‘twitteraties’ with Lok Sabha elections approaching. Most of their tweets are about the campaign trail and happy faces. And at times they don’t refrain from taking a dig at one other.

“Ajay Maken the Congress Candidate announced a ticket for Adarsh Scam Accused Ashok Chavan,” Lekhi tweeted on Wednesday.

AAP nominee Ashish Khetan’s new Twitter handle sent out more than 20 tweets on Thursday. 

New Delhi is one of the high impact constituencies, a study by Internet and Mobile Association of India and IRIS Knowledge Foundation says.

AAP and BJP, the more internet savvy parties, took to woo voters online in a big way. Congress is also not been far behind in reaching out to voters on digital platforms; it’s contacting voters through WhatsApp Messenger with the subject ‘WithCongress’.

Shifting away from direct publicity, the online battles between political parties are intensifying. Party supporters, both paid and volunteers, are transforming themselves into internet trolls and are frequently unsparing towards someone else’s leader. 

So on social media, voters are having more than regular encounters with morphed photographs, deriding cartoons, contemptuous blog posts and  spoof videos.