HYDERABAD: The Congress has embarked on a strategic approach focusing on strengthening the party at the grassroots level through an extensive series of training camps facilitated by the party’s war room as preparation for forthcoming elections. The war room has been divided into different sections -- legal, social, training, and research.
Among the four modules, training is assumed to be vital in the context of the electoral battle ahead. During the training sessions, the cadres are made aware of the nitty-gritty of election rules and regulations. The cadres are also directed to spend some quality time, at least 15 minutes, with each household, during the campaign. At the core of this initiative is the recognition of the crucial role of young voters and families that have not availed of any of the welfare schemes from the government.
Focusing on the 18 to 21 demographic, the Congress is directing its workers to tailor content for platforms like Instagram. To reach out to the youngsters, the party cadres have been asked to improve their social media presence by frequently updating WhatsApp status, creating broadcast lists to make the messages look like personalized messages, uploading Instagram reels and Facebook stories, and disseminating messages through WhatsApp communities.
The party functionaries have also suggested the cadres engage with the youth on Clubhouse, a social media platform where discussions take place. The grand old party is also relying on “Telangana-2023”, an app that is accessible to the booth agents, enabled with the processed data of electoral statistics released by the ECI. The app will give the information of their booth voters at their fingertips.
Speaking to TNIE, Kummari Srikanth, a key functionary at the Congress war room, said they are motivating the cadres to campaign with an ideology-driven positive approach with facts. He said that they are asking the booth-level volunteers to launch five creative campaigns every day from personal profiles at regular intervals of every three hours. He said that the party cadres have been asked to engage with neutral voters both online and offline.