LUCKNOW: With the first phase of polls in 73 Assembly constituencies across 15 western UP districts just a week away, the major players have gotten into battle mode with multi-pronged combat strategies. War rooms have come up to attack rivals in the country’s biggest political battleground.
The hi-tech war room of the Samajwadi Party (SP), armed with a huge fleet of digital warfare, is abuzz under supervision of a brigade of techies and poll strategists here.
While newly-anointed SP chief Akhilesh Yadav is traversing western UP with ally Congress in tow, party warriors are holding command in the three-room office in the Janeshwar Mishra Trust complex war room by putting up a spirited digital campaign through Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.
Akhilesh’s MP wife Dimple Yadav is entrusted with mobilising the women electorate by connecting with them through WhatsApp and making them aware of the women-specific policies of the SP government and its achievements.
The team of professionals overseeing the campaign has its eyes on the activities of the 1.6 lakh booth-level workforce, electorate’s feedback on the party manifesto, social media and call centre functioning.
The war room has five sections—research and analysis, social media, media monitoring, digital content (audio-video) and feedback through call centres. Akhilesh’s campaign is also looked after here. The strategists also take out finer details of local issues of areas where the CM has to address rallies.
According to war room head Ashish Yadav, who was a communication expert on government programmes with the BBC for 12 years before joining the SP chief, “Through call centres we keep in direct touch with candidates and workers and guide them from here.”
Anshuman Sharma, who also quit BBC to join Ashish, heads the research wing team, which plans the party campaign and the party chief in particular, apart from collecting campaign feedback.
The other most important wing of the war room is its social media section, which claims to have a reach of 1.2 crore people. According to Ahmed Aftab Naqvi, who controls social media ops, such a gargantuan reach makes the task more challenging. Aftab has been running country’s one of the largest independent digital agencies in Mumbai.
The media monitoring cell tracks development throughout the day across news channels, newspapers and online news. It is entrusted with preparing a team of party spokespersons to participate in debates on TV channels.
