BENGALURU: Door-to-door campaigns, road shows and rallies may be obligatory for election campaigning but targeting voters in unexpected places is the new trend now. Be it addressing voters outside fitness centres, playgrounds and parks, temples, weddings, buses or mandatorily having five meetings a day with co-op societies, banks, weavers, and washermen, candidates are doing it all!
“I meet resident welfare associations, women’s organisations and self-help groups, cooperative societies and banks, weavers’ sections and washermen community from dhobi ghat. We also meet people at parks and take advice from senior citizens. Apart from door-to-door campaigns, we do offbeat meetings like these,” Ravi Subramanya, BJP MLA from Basavanagudi said.
“We have a war room and decide what messages to send out to them. Our volunteers have gone and brought data from voters. We send them voice calls and text messages,” he said. Photo Voter Slips inform voters about the polling station where he/she is enrolled and his/her serial number in the electoral rolls. Booth-level agents of political parties help in distributing these slips that in turn helps them get a recall value with the public. “I am determined not to use temples for political gains so I don’t canvass there. Even the law says so about places of worship. Not just today, I attend 98 per cent of the weddings I am invited to but don’t ask for votes there. There were two funerals in my area recently. I attended it out of solidarity. People understand it themselves though we don’t say anything when we attend gatherings,” he said.“No time for playing but I attend tournaments and mingle with kids. Be it badminton or cricket, they themselves ask us to hit a ball or two, so we oblige,” he said.
GOING GREEN
Meenakshi Byregowda, Byatarayanapura Congress MLA Krishna Byregowda’s wife said they have six cycles with volunteers spreading the message of their candidate rather than mini vans blaring the message.
There are 400 layouts in the constituency and he meets apartment dwellers, has road corner meetings, meets them at parks and playgrounds and many other public spaces such as markets and supermarkets in — Vidyaranyapura, Sahakaranagar Main Road, Bagalur Road, Thanisandra Circle, rural villages and 10 gram panchayats. “We are minimising the use of paper as much as possible and using social media to spread our message. There are no flex banners (which is not allowed by law) in our campaigns.
The cycle is fitted with a poster of him. We don’t have air-conditioned vans in our constituency,” Meenakshi said.The JD(S) candidates who can be king or kingmakers in the coming elections have their candidates heavily canvassing in parks and other public places, and these include AM Hanumantha Gowda from Yelahanka, TN Javarayi Gowda from Yeshwanthapur, Ramachandra GH from RR Nagar, R Manjunath from Dasarahalli, K Gopalaiah from Mahalakshmi Layout, and K Bagegowda from Basavanagudi.