Delhi elections 2015: AAP volunteers in Bengaluru trying to move hearts in poll-bound city

BENGALURU: With three days to go for the Delhi poll, the campaign has reached fever pitch, not just in the capital, but even in remote Bengaluru. A part of the campaign for Delhi has been outsourced to Bengaluru by the two main political rivals, AAP and the BJP.

If AAP volunteers in the southern city are calling Delhiites night and day, asking for votes and stumbling over Hindi words like “bijli“ “paani“ and “aapki rai nahin maangi“, the BJP's IT and communication cells in Bengaluru have been tweeting away on #AAPFundingScam and #HawalaAtMidnight, ensuring that they trend for two days. In contrast, the third party in the fray , Congress, whose campaign is practically invisible so far, has not bothered to reach out to Bengaluru, though it is the ruling party in the state.

“We have not been asked to do anything by our national leaders or by the communications incharge, Manish Tiwari. Some people have voluntarily gone to Delhi, but we are not doing anything else,“ a representative of the Congress' IT cell in Bengaluru, who did not want to go on record, said.An AAP innovation is the new system of tracking volunteer calls from all over the world and training the speakers through a specific software on what to say to a Delhi voter. The basic pitch has been that the bilji-paani situation in Delhi was way better when the AAP ruled for 49 days, while corruption, they say , was at an all-time low .

Volunteers -whether from Thiruvananthapuram or Ludhiana -also apologise for Arvind Kejriwal's decision to resign and tell the voters: we did not take your opinion on that, please forgive us and give us another chance. The stumbling block, literally, for the 5,000odd call volunteers from the South, has been Hindi.

“Through a software and a video demonstration, we have trained our volunteers to speak -in accented, tooti-phooti Hindi - over phone and ask for votes from people in Delhi,“ AAP volunteer Vikash Shukla told ET. Siddarth Sharma, AAP call volunteer and convener for Karnataka, told ET the typical spiel for a Delhi call: “Jai Hind, mein Aam Aadmi Siddarth Sharma Bengaluru se bol raha hoon. Mein Aam Aadmi Party ka karyakarta hoon. Kya mein aap ke saath do minute baat kar sakta hoon?“ The reaction from most Delhiites, according to Sharma, is delight that someone from outside is calling them for the poll.