The real fight for the MCD polls between BJP and AAP has been online

Having tasted blood at the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the Rajouri Garden by-poll, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is preparing for the civic body polls in the national capital. With one victory under their belt, the BJP has focused its attack on Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on the assumption that his party is the true opposition. On the ground, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has been on the receiving end of both the BJP and the Congress Party. When the BJP hammered Kejriwal for “misusing” public money on advertisements and allegedly fighting personal lawsuits with the tax-payers money, the online army of the saffron party ensured it goes viral. For instance on April 4, within hours, the hashtag #जनता_का_पैसा_केजरी_के_मजे (#JantaKaPaisaKejriKeMaze) was one of the topmost trending on Twitter. AAP, once considered experts of social media warfare, weren’t slow to respond. Its IT cell tried to point out the ineffectiveness of BJP–which is at the helm of power in all three municipal corporations in Delhi for past fifteen years–by successfully getting the hashtag  #BJPkeMCDGhosts trending.

Social media has become essential to the strategies of parties contesting the MCD polls, equalling ground activism in rallies, roads shows and public meeting. And as result, the Information Technology cells of all parties and specifically those of the BJP and AAP are have secretly been at war online.

For instance, on April 5, on the morning the AAP IT cell managed to get #BJPKeMCDGhosts trending, the BJP IT cell countered them in hours with the hashtag – #DelhiMaangeBhajpa  (#दिल्ली_मांगे_भाजपा) which also remained the top trend in Delhi for hours.

However, Kunal Kapoor from BJP’s Delhi IT cell denies that any extra effort was put into countering AAP’s hashtag on twitter. Ankit Lal, head of AAP’s IT cell told Newslaundry “now we have stopped countering negative campaigns of BJP. Every time they had run anti-AAP campaigns, it ends of benefiting us.” When asked how, Lal and his team members laughed, saying, “ Unka bhi focus hum hain, aur humara bhi focus hum hain (While we are focused on our campaign, their campaign is focused on us too.)”

The BJP IT cell

In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP IT cell had decimated the prospects of the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party. With almost two years of hard work and 4030 team members across the state, besides the block level team, BJP’s smart, virtual campaign schooled its voters in the most effective manner. While Twitter and Facebook were used to create a buzz around events, WhatsApp became the go-to tool for its round the clock publicity campaign.

Possibly taking a cue from the success of the strategy in UP, the Delhi state team geared up for the MCD polls. However, the core team members said that because it is a small election, they don’t need to work as extensively as they would have in a state election.

“In past 20 days, we have successfully trended 19 hashtags used by the party’s Delhi twitter handle” 37-year-old Kunal Kapoor told Newslaundry. He added that while its rival AAP had been able to trend three hashtags, Congress only had one hashtag trending, “shayad unki team Rahul Gandhi ki tarah ek bar kaam kar ke thak jaate hain aur fir kuch dino ke liye chutti par chali jaati hai (possibly, like their vice-president Rahul Gandhi, the IT cell too – goes on vacation after one a successful campaign,)” said Kapoor, a far-from-subtle dig at the party.

The consensus around the BJP office is that at least on the social media front, their only serious competitor is AAP.

While BJP Delhi’s Facebook page, BJP4Delhi, has over 22 lakh likes, there are only around 1.46 lakh followers on its twitter handle @BJP4Delhi. The party manages to put up seven to eight posts on Facebook – including graphics, videos and FB lives of its party leaders’ addresses and press conferences. Kapoor said that statements by national and state BJP leaders would set the tone for social media posts.

Another core team member, Abhishek Sharma told us that they have been successful in ensuring that the BJP campaign song for the MCD polls, sung by Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari, reaches a wider audience. While it was plugged on twitter several times, the party workers have been forwarding it on WhatsApp.

Organisationally, the plan was to build a structure similar to BJP’s UP IT cell which has its reach in every block and polling booth across the state. However, the Delhi team has yet to achieve that. Presently, while the core team has six members, its state team has 25 people on board. There are 14 districts in Delhi, and BJP has a team of 10-12 people in each district led by a coordinator and co-coordinator. Teams of four to five are already working in all 70 assemblies-the saffron party has an IT cell in each 272 mandals (wards). “Our target is to have at least one representative at the polling booth. So far, we have been able to depute our teams on 3,000 polling stations of Delhi,” said Delhi BJP IT cell convener Sumeet Bhasin.

It is important to note that graphics, videos and collages are sent by the IT cell to these office bearers through broadcast messages and WhatsApp groups – who further disseminate information in their locality.

A graphic circulated on WhatsApp by the BJP IT cell

“We have 8,500 WhatsApp groups in Delhi, where we constantly communicate with our executive members, morchas, booth palaks and political activists,” Bhasin, who has been with the party for past three decades, told Newslaundry.

According to Kapoor, around 1.5 lakh people are connected to the party through WhatsApp. The two youngest members of the core team are Nikhil (who declined to give his full name), 24, and Dhruv Dubey, 22. “During the elections, the work gets a bit challenging but now it is a normal affair for us. Our campaign is majorly based on positive aspects-[the party’s] achievements,” said Dubey-a Delhi University Political Science graduate who associated with BJP soon after giving his class 10th exam.

This was echoed by Bhasin as well, “Statistically, our campaign for MCD is 80-90 per cent positive. It’s about our achievements in all three civic bodies; BJP’s works.” He quickly added, “if something against AAP comes on the platter. We cannot ignore it.”  Bhasin cites issues such as Ram Jethmalani’s legal bill row, and the Shunglu committee report as instances of something ‘coming up’. “We are also exposing their claims. For instance, if AAP has improved the health facilities in Delhi, why does minister Gopal Rai prefer private healthcare when it comes to his own treatment?” said Bhasin.

Even though the people we spoke to deny that the BJP campaign is directed at any one person or party, a simple scroll through BJP Delhi’s Facebook page and Twitter feed shows otherwise–Kejriwal seems to be a popular target.

Interestingly, when asked if the BJP IT cell used generic images in its social media campaign or if they were specific images of Delhi, Bhasin categorically said, “all images used by us are original.” He added that an in-house team of volunteers created content for the party.

And while that might be so, Bhasin and his team might need to revisit this tweet from last week:

The image of a street light shown as the achievement of BJP governed North Delhi civic body, is in reality, a stock image. Results of a single Google image search showed that it was earliest used in July 2014. However, North MCD decided to start one of the largest conventional street lighting replacement programme, in the country, only in March 2017.

Street lights seem to be a sore point for the IT cell. On April 4, an image from the website of the Municipality of Shelburne in Canada was used by BJP as an achievement of South MCD with the caption “Replaced 2 Lakh Sodium Street Lights with LED lights“. This ‘gaffe’ was reported by the mainstream media and the tweet was deleted with no explanation given.

It’s not hard to imagine how such a ‘minor’ error could slip past the IT cell, after all as Basin admitted, this campaign is a “war-like situation.”

There is no overall campaign plan according to the IT cell members. They shape and post content according to emerging needs. No one clarified what exactly these were. “We do file daily analytical reports about our campaigns,” said Kapoor. The team declined to share these with us and remained very secretive about the specifics of its social media campaign, particularly WhatsApp. Nor did they divulge much information about the call centre the party is running for the civic body polls.

We asked which social media platform was the most crucial for the party, Bhasin merely said, “it’s a 360-degree campaign” as he rushed off to manage a press conference by a senior union minister.

The BJP IT cell is now focusing its energy in sharing details of the party’s manifesto that was released yesterday. It has also prioritised BJP Chief Manoj Tiwari’s road shows

The Aam Aadmi Party IT cell

AAP’s IT cell geared up for the MCD election soon after wrapping up their operation in Punjab and Goa. “We returned from Punjab and Goa in February and the central team started the coordination work for MCD polls from February 5,” Ankit Lal told Newslaundry. According to Lal, the AAP volunteers have been able to “trend 14 hashtags used by the party’s Delhi twitter handle” – AAP Delhi NCR – which has over 55,000 followers. According to the analytics shared by the party, on April 7, till 12 noon, this twitter handle had over 4.1 crore impressions — which is the number of times a user is served a particular tweet on the timeline or search results.

The Facebook page of AAP Delhi has over 11.73 lakh likes and its presence is increasing as the civic body polls near. Between March 31 and April 7, the number of ‘likes’ grew by 40 per cent. The reach of its posts grew by 113 per cent, and the video posts had highest engagement ratio. The total views for all the videos posted on the page grew up to 43.24 lakh views – a 213 per cent increase.

Unlike the BJP IT cell, the structure of AAP’s IT cell is much more informal. Besides the small team of 12 members who work from a cramped room at the AAP headquarters in Delhi, there is no formal hierarchy in the party for its social media team. “We basically coordinate and take feedback from our 5,000 volunteers spread across the world,” Lal said. He also runs his own IT solutions company and his recent claim to fame was a detailed analytical report on how specific tweets related to BJP were being posted from Thailand in June 2016.

The core team which manages AAP’s IT cell is also far younger as compared to the BJP’s. Most of them are under 30 and are volunteers. For those like 25-year-old Amit Katiar, an engineering graduate from National Institute of Technology, the party’s ideology is a driving force. “At times we give our salary (as donations) to the party and its MLAs,” 24-year-old Atma Santosh said when asked about monetary remuneration. “Party ka MLA log par hi hum logon ka paisa banta hoga. Humko party ne bahut [social media managing] skill set diya hai (we donate our salary to several MLAs from the party. Over a period of time we have acquired the skill set of managing social media,)” said Santosh.

A separate team creates content for the IT cell and it is based on the guidelines of the central and state leadership.

Interestingly, Lal refused to divulge any details about the teams working at different levels in Delhi and their working style. “All that I can tell you is that we coordinate with our volunteers through various WhatsApp and Facebook groups,” he said. Various teams at the ward, assembly and district levels are provided content – graphics and videos by the IT cell. The party has one person in charge of the IT teams in each district.

“Through our door to door campaign in Delhi, AAP has already collected a fresh ward-wise data of around 15 lakh families,” Lal and Shashi Kant, another member of the core team, told Newslaundry while sharing the details of data collection process. Besides this, the party also has a legacy data, collected over a period of time.

AAP officially seem to take the rules and regulations of WhatsApp a little more seriously. They claim us they stay away from creating and running such groups as part of the campaign. “WhatsApp rules hold the admin responsible for the content being shared on groups,” said Lal. He further added that the IT cell doesn’t want to get into any trouble for someone else’s mistake or impropriety. The volunteers run WhatsApp groups in their individual capacity. Kant said, “each ward has at least eight to ten teams with approximately 150 to 200 people in each group.”

In terms of content, those messages with Kejriwal’s face and positive content have a much higher engagement rate for the party. According to the AAP IT cell, its two broadcast numbers have received thousands of messages—including videos – supporting the party’s core poll promise of waiving the residential tax. The party has been sharing images of Mohalla clinics, Delhi government schools and others. When asked about the source of these images, they said “we only use pictures shot by our party members or volunteers”.

However, we noticed this image from a Delhi students’ protest being used by the party as an image for #DelhiSaysNoToHouseTax campaign.

The fact that a common team handles both the state and national level pages, as well as the twitter handle, could jeopardise the daily business of the state page. For instance, on April 9, the AAP Delhi twitter handle just had two tweets and on April 10, till noon, there were no tweets at all. The IT team has focused all its energy on the national twitter handle. To be specific, tweets related to Kejriwal’s press conference on electronic voting machines had taken the entire space on April 10.

The ‘war’ will continue till April 23, at least!

Lal said that with experiences of 2013 and 2015 assembly elections AAP has stopped running counter hashtags or campaigns against BJP and other opposition parties. They also claimed that they refrained from targeting specific people. “Political allegations are fine, it’s part of the political campaign but we don’t believe in attacking individuals.” Lal and others from AAP IT cell realise how badly the party needs to win the civic polls. However, the Rajouri Garden by-poll debacle has not changed their strategy, as they believe “the two are not interrelated”.

Back in the BJP IT cell room, on Pandit Pant Marg, Bhasin told Newslaundry “until April 23, it’s a daily war for us.” The party leadership has vowed to “expose one lie of Kejriwal” each day. While going after the ‘crimes’ of AAP is the primary work of the BJP IT cell, it is also coming up with BJP ‘success stories’ regarding the MCD.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @amit_bhardwaz.