Selfie with Mufflerman Arvind Kejriwal at Rs 500

BENGALURU: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Bengaluru has kicked off an innovative campaign called "selfie with the mufflerman" to raise funds for the party to fight the Assembly polls in Delhi.

Those interested need to register in the party website. The registration will be open till January 7, and the party will randomly pick 25 of those registered to allow them to take a selfie with the former Delhi chief minister. It involves three steps, says the party in its site. "Go to mufflerman.aapvol.in, donate Rs 500 or more, get lucky, pack your bags to Bengaluru on January 11 to meet Arvind Kejriwal."

“Today's generation is selfie-loving, so we devised this innovative programme in Bengaluru. This programme is to mainly attract net savvy youngsters and, donate for a cause and to promote our party,“ AAP leader and former director at Infosys Limited, V Balakrishnan, told ET. “This is an initiative from AAP Karantaka, but open to people from across India, and outside,“ he added.

He cited the recent report from the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), 73% of funding for all major political parties between 2004-05 and 2012-13 came from unknown sources. “This is a new way of transparently raising money for the party. We want to do honest politics in a transparent way,“ he said.

The responses on the Twitter appear to be quite encouraging for the party. “I just signed up for #SelfieWithMufflerman.Spending my hard-earned money for a good cause,“ said a tweet from Aakriti Gupta@Aakritty. The party is also working on a few fund raising events when Kejriwal is in Bengaluru on January 11 such as a dinner event. “We are still working on a few innovative ideas,“ Balakrishnan said. The party recently launched an imaginative fund raising campaign, and the person whose tweets were re-tweeted by another, would contribute Rs 100 to the party on each re-tweet.

“Our idea was to create awareness about our party to the maximum number of people, so we asked people to re-tweet some of our tweets, and offered to donate Rs 100 on each such re-tweet.