Election war is not confined to the sloganeering on the streets or road shows in Telangana but in the four walls of a room with a few laptops and systems and the professionals acting as a link between the voters, leaders and the party high command.
Keeping a tab on the movement of every influential leader from village level to mandal and even district headquarters, the information gathered is passed on by the war rooms in the constituencies to the State headquarters where it is acted upon immediately. Both the Congress and the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) are using technology as a tool not only to reach out to the voters but also to track political developments at the micro level.
The BRS is now innovating their operations with the creation of 119 war rooms, one each located in every constituency, to collect the information and send it to the State war room. Each of these rooms would be manned by four to five people, mostly strong loyalists of the party or family members of the contestants. In turn, they would have assistants in each and every village who would gather key inputs.
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The war room is equipped with a database of voters with their backgrounds, political affiliations, changing preferences, social status and details like who they would be influenced by. This will in turn pave the way for strategies like creating a new narrative to suit them and help in the management of the campaign.
Four categories
The party has already categorised the voters into four groups: those who are pro-BRS, those who are unsure, those who are angry with the party and the government and those who won’t vote for the BRS at any cost.
BRS working president and Municipal Minister, K.T. Rama Rao agreed recently to a group of reporters that the voters in the age group of 18 to 35 have developed animosity towards the government for various reasons. They would be the major target for the party now and every such voter would be reached out to. The party will not leave them uninformed about the government’s achievements.
The war rooms will play a major role in digging out such voters and giving input on who would be the best to convince them. In rural areas, influences are common and such leaders who can convince the voters to vote for a particular party or candidate have already been identified. “We will try our best till the voter reaches the polling booth,” a senior leader overseeing the war rooms told The Hindu.
The war room soldiers will also keep track of leaders who are feeling neglected by the party or being reached out to by the opposition parties. The BRS leadership will then immediately jump in to pacify them.
The Congress has also set up a war room in Hyderabad with a similar aim. The party roped in some software professionals with good communication and analytics skills to prepare reports from the information on the ground. Poll strategist Sunil Kanugolu’s professional experience is also being used to collate the information and take the right measures.
