BJP, Congress to expand micro presence for macro impact in upcoming Karnataka polls

Arch-rivals BJP and Congress are deploying new poll tools in Karnataka with both parties banking on having more feet on the ground to woo voters for the 2023 Assembly elections.

The BJP will, for the first time in Karnataka, roll out the Page Committee concept, which will add to its cadre of saffron troopers.

Earlier, the saffron party had a Page Pramukh in which every page of the voters list had one party worker in charge. “We will now have one pramukh and three sah-pramukh,” BJP Karnataka Yuva Morcha president Dr Sandeep Kumar said.

“Each page has about 30-35 voters. The committee we are forming this time will help us go more micro in our voter outreach. The constitution of the committee will depend on the voters of each page. For example, the committee will have an SC member if there are more voters belonging to that community,” he explained.

Also, the party will try the ‘One Booth, Ten Youth’ idea coined during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. “We hadn’t been able to roll this out fully. But, in the last six months, we are focussing on this in every mandal (taluk),” Kumar said. “These 10 youths will be documented so that there are no fake names.”

The D K Shivakumar-led Congress is on a high after enrolling more than 72 lakh ‘verified’ members, the highest among Indian states.

Between February 4 and April 15 this year, the Congress deployed 2.30 lakh enrollers who went door to door for memberships. “Many people became members voluntarily,” AICC Karnataka in-charge for digital membership Raghunandan Ramanna said.

The memberships happened on the basis of voter IDs, making it a genuine process. “And, because the membership process was digital, we have data to identify where we are weak,” Ramanna said.

The Congress will form booth, block and panchayat committees that will act as the party’s on-ground sentries, a plan Shivakumar is seriously pursuing.

There is already Digital Youth for Every Booth, where the idea is to make the party’s narratives penetrate to the grassroots, KPCC spokesperson A N Nataraj Gowda said. “We are also forming WhatsApp groups in each of the 64,000 booths to push our content and get feedback,” he said.

The Congress now has rich data that will come in handy in the election year. “We have identified households that didn’t become our members,” Ramanna said.

“And, converting memberships into votes won’t be a problem as long as we keep them engaged.”

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