BJP planning virtual outreach for voters in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh

To deal with the Election Commission’s ban on physical poll rallies till January 15, the Bharatiya Janata Party is working on a detailed plan for virtual outreach to the voters in Uttar Pradesh.

Virtual rallies and the dissemination of these across thousands of WhatsApp groups, backended by a system to host lakhs of viewers is at the heart of the saffron party’s digital campaign network.

A senior party functionary from the party’s headquarters told DH that during the three-day long meeting of the party’s core committee for Uttar Pradesh, which started Tuesday, the schedules of virtual rallies of the party’s four senior leaders – prime minister Narendra Modi, president Jagat Prasad Nadda, home minister Amit Shah, and defence minister Rajnath Singh are being chalk out.

Sources said that PM Modi is scheduled to have a rally days after January 14. The BJP UP unit is working on scheduling the rallies of UP CM Yogi Adityanath.

Read | UP poll aspirants apprehensive of virtual campaigning

“We have just finished the first phase of the poll campaign on January 9 with the Jan Vishwas rallies. We are meeting soon to discuss the second phase of the campaign, which will be largely digital,” said the leader.

BJP leaders said that during the Covid period rallies where 8 to 10 lakh people have connected have already been successfully conducted. Similar rallies using Zoom and Webex are being worked out.

But this time, the party is creating a studio of sorts in the podium, where with video mixing and projection two or three leaders connecting from different locations can be viewed as being part of the podium.

Three major rallies, of Nadda, and union ministers Narendra Tomar and Smriti Irani on the party’s ‘Sewa hi sangathan’ were conducted in this fashion, in addition to several rallies of PM Modi earlier.

State IT Cell head Kameshwar Mishra said that the IT unit that is backending poll efforts started work in April 2020, days after the first lockdown was announced.

“We anticipated in advance with covid spreading, and we never shut down office during two lockdowns even for a day,” said Mishra over the phone.

Over 12,000 party workers are working as part of the unit, divided into two parts. The party’s social media unit has 8000-odd members, while the IT department has 4000 workers. If the covid situation continues, the party plans to rope in more cameramen, OB vans to telecast rallies on traditional platforms, and buy a lot more bandwidth that it has.

The rallies, a leader involved in the party’s tech efforts said, will be pushed out in all of the party’s WhatsApp groups amounting to more than 2 lakh. As part of the Whatsapp hierarchical structure, the BJP has booth-level, mandal-level, and district wise groups. This does not include the WhatsApp groups spread across the six regions that the party has already divided the state in.

These rallies will be designed for different segments of voters. Jawan (youth) and kisan (farmers), as well as women form the largest target groups.

In addition to that, the party has been working on using technology to take Mann Ki Baat to voters to the booth level. Door to door efforts will be taken up, too, as the EC has allowed for four to five party workers to be part of that.

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