Lok Sabha polls 2024: How BJP is chasing 3rd straight poll win with power of feedback from the ground

New Delhi: A three-pronged feedback system comprising a well-oiled organisational structure, the SARAL app and thousands of call centres are powering the BJP’s efforts in the Lok Sabha polls as the saffron party looks to down the I.N.D.I.A. bloc and notch another triumph. 

Sources in the party said in addition to carrying out over four key surveys in the run up to the elections, the party is shaping its poll policies based on the feedback it is receiving from these three systems. 

The Sangathan Reporting and Analysis app (SARAL) has turned out to be rich pickings, with data of over 58 lakh users giving a peek into the mood of the party’s workers on the ground.   

The app, which is basically an enterprise resource planning platform of the party, was designed to primarily digitise the internal organisational data. But with exhaustive datasets available on it, the app has helped the party make key decisions.

Sources involved in the process said workers of the party, from booth to the mandal level, are present on the platform, helping the party collect granular data. 

Among the data sets available include the number of voters in a region, current political preferences, candidate preferences among voters as well as identification of leaders that can join the BJP.

“Among the data we ask workers to key in includes a column called ‘remarks’, where they are free to tell us anything, ranging from whether a particular candidate is preferable to another,” a party leader said.         

While the SARAL app is used across all party units, Madhya Pradesh relies on the Sangathan app, a predecessor of SARAL. The state unit’s platform has 40 lakh users on it. 

“The Sangathan app has real-time monitoring of data and feedback,” said a senior leader of the state unit’s IT department. 

In MP alone, as part of the BJP’s new membership drive ahead of the party’s Foundation Day, they managed to bring in 1,26,000 new members across 20,000 of the state’s 64,000 booths. “The data is still coming in, we expect at least 3 lakh-4 lakh new members,” the leader said. 

Then there is the Samvaad Kendra, or call centre system, which has been the backbone of the BJP’s poll efforts for years.

While in 2019, the party had 15,000 call centres running across the country, this year, over 30,000 such call centres are being run.

The primary job of these centres, sources said, is to call up voters and ask about their feedback, their grievances on certain issues, and offer resolution if possible. 

“Apart from these, there are 370 call centres that are looking specifically at the Lok Sabha seats where the BJP is contesting,” a leader from the BJP’s IT department said. 

Sources said that some of these call centres were outsourced in the past. But efforts are now being made to manage them in-house. “We try to bring in people who are ideologically attuned to us, apart from having the qualities that a call centre needs,” the leader quoted above said. 

Lastly, the party also relies on its traditional methods — conversations and feedback from its local leaders to the state president or prabhari, and then on to the central leadership — to make decisions.