Election 2014: Congress, BJP, AAP & TMC run boot camps and crash courses for youth leaders

KOLKATA/NEW DELHI: Their ranks are full of young, enthusiastic but raw recruits who need to be honed into battle readiness before the elections. Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, Aam Aadmi Party and Trinamool Congress are all running boot camps, putting their newest members through crash courses on party history, asking effective questions, determining the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, understanding and managing perception, parliamentary procedures and public speaking.

Consultants, professors, party veterans and organisational development managers are being roped in to put recruits through their paces. “About five years ago, we would have trained about 27,000 young leaders.

With the elections approaching, the party is in war mode,” said Nawin Sinha, co-convenor of BJP’s Sahyog cell. “The number of party workers per parliamentary constituency has gone up from 50 to 100. Over the past year, we have trained 54,000 workers and young leaders.”

Rajeev Gowda, an IIM professor on sabbatical and preparing to run on a Congress ticket from Bangalore North, has been lecturing younger party colleagues about the leadership attributes of personalities such as Winston Churchill, MK Gandhi and APJ Abdul Kalam, apart from leaders of rival parties. The size of the batch getting trained varies from 30 to 300 at the district level. Hasiba Amin, 23, was coached by heads of media companies and marketing trainers.

“I feel much more confident now and feel I’m able to deal with situations and people in a better manner,” said the national secretary of the National Students Union of India (NSUI) and one of the faces in the Congress ad campaign ‘Kattar Soch Nahi, Yuva Josh’.

In the last year and a half, Congress ‘ youth wings have called on several experts to provide training. They include Gurunath Kelekar, freedom fighter and founder of Goa-based NGO Marg; Sanjay Upendram, founder and CEO of Hyderabad-based management consulting and leadership development firm Amarthi Consulting; and IIM-Calutta professor Jaishree Jaitwani.

Some 25,000-30,000 young elected office bearers of NSUI and Youth Congress would have been trained over the past year, estimated Roji John, NSUI vice president. In the last 4-5 years, BJP has seen the entry of young members without previous political associations and has formed a training cell, Prashikshan.

Trinamool Congress has designated senior MPs for training. Sudip Bandyopadhyay and Saugato Roy discuss parliamentary procedures and how to ask effective questions, while national spokesperson Derek O’Brien conducts four workshops a year on communication skills and the power of social media.

The year-old Aam Aadmi Party is being helped by organizational development advisor Shalini Gupta to provide a corporate structure to the group. Gupta, who has worked with various Fortune 500 companies, has quit to help AAP improve its performance.