How political parties strategising for Karnataka polls through war rooms

BENGALURU: A Basavanna photo is the only wall decoration at the Congress party’s war room on Cunningham Road. With barely a day to go for election campaign to end, you’d expect the mood in the party to be feverish. But it’s an easy calm that welcomes you. And even as the ‘fake voter ID cards’ expose continues to unspool, the seven-member war room team, headed by SR Mahroz Khan and comprising Suraj Hegde, AP Basavaraj, Ashish Dua and SA Hussain, doesn’t betray any tension.

“We held a press conference last night at 2.30am and were back at work in the morning by 10am,” says Basavaraj. The war room, Khan says, has also doubled up as their second home for the last month. “This office is the nerve centre for Karnataka elections. It is connected to the social media centre, the call centre and the media centre. And this is also where prominent party leaders have been meeting to discuss strategies,” says Khan.

“We have been busy doing quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 56,000+ booths around Karnataka. We have been dispersing the data — from voter behaviour to which booths are not Congress strongholds — to party volunteers at every booth in the state,” he says. The idea obviously is to convert every last constituency member to vote for Congress.


As a long-time Congress member, Khan is an old-hand when it comes to war-room strategising, “I was part of the team during 2014 general elections and worked from Varanasi,” he says. But this is for the first time, Khan says, that “we have focused on a strategy that aimed to create a strong network of booth agents”, he says, crediting KC Venugopal, AICC general secretary incharge of Karnataka.

WAR ROOM OFF LIMITS
“As a policy, we don’t allow access to our war room,” says Balaji Srinivas, social media in-charge for BJP Karnataka, sitting at the party’s state media centre in Malleswaram.

All the same, the media centre is a beehive of activity. A press conference being addressed by party spokesperson Sambit Patra ensures a slew of media channels turning up to cover it. But the press meet is only one of the headaches for Srinivas. With the last leg of campaign up, the party’s national leaders are on a rally spree and as the social media head, Srinivas’ concerns include ensuring the rallies and the speeches are covered, that the hashtags on various social media platforms are correct, that the live feed is smooth and that the campaigns, be it mass messages, videos, WhatsApp forwards, are sent out on time.

While BJP in 2014 may have been the leader in tapping the power of social media, this time around, the opponents may have caught up with it fast. “But unlike them, we do our own campaigns instead of hiring vendors,” says Srinivas.

“Ten years ago, internet barely had a presence in villages. Today, most villages have it and that has enabled us to reach out to rural voters easily. Smartphones have made it easier,” he says.

DISRUPTIVE IDEAS
Members of the Aam Admi Party’s war room in CV Raman Nagar has one goal: to make themselves visible in the voters’ psyche. It is a small space but is littered with campaign artillery. There are LED-lit backpacks bearing the candidate, Mohan Dasari’s, face. There are stacks of pamphlets lying around, along with speakers and ubiquitous computers.

“We started our campaigning in November 2017,” says Anand Prakash Vasudevan, president and campaign manager for AAP’s CV Raman Nagar constituency. Dasari has visited over 60,000 houses as part of a door-todoor campaign.

Sitting in the war room of AAP, Vasudevan says, “The campaign has worked because from being a non-entity six months ago, the party is being considered a strong contender today.” Befitting a young party like AAP, the energy in the war room is high. “On any given day or night, we discuss, debate and argue,” reveals Vasudevan. And loud discussions, it seems, have helped the team come up with off-beat ideas like holding flash mobs to attract young voters and street plays targeted at lowincome groups.

“People want a leader who will work on their behalf, which is why our manifesto addresses basic issues residents face,” says Dasari.