Congress to regain lost ground via virtual war

Thursday, 04/02/2016

http://paper.hindustantimes.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

CHANDIGARH: Taking a leaf out of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 poll script, the Congress, too, will soon have its own army of social media warriors for the 2017 Punjab polls. Punjab Congress president Capt Amarinder Singh is readying his own social media war-room to counter the challenge of the Aam Aadmi Party’s strong on-ground and “virtual” presence in the state.

Though he is in talks with Modi’s and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s strategist Prashant Kishor—who may be engaged by Amarinder after a goahead from Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi—the former Punjab CM is already setting up a social media war-room, which will rope in volunteers in each district and constituency of the state to take the party’s campaign to young voters through popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp.

Other than flagging issues, policies and poll promises of the party, the war-room will also monitor the flow of news and prepare political inputs and reactions to take on opponents on the social media.

Other than political scions—Amarinder’s grandson Nirvan Singh, who works for a Delhi-based firm, Rep India, and MLA Kewal Dhillon’s son Karan Dhillon—Amarinder said Sadhvi Khosla, who was a volunteer for Modi in his 2014 poll campaign and hails from Amarinder’s hometown Patiala, would oversee the party’s social media campaign.

When contacted, Khosla said, “The Akali Dal is not a threat but young voters are confused between the AAP and Congress. It will be a youth-centric and positive social media campaign to know what the youth wants and how the Congress can deliver. To counter the AAP, we will also highlight how the Kejriwal government has created a mess in Delhi.”

The war-room will not be housed in the Congress Bhawan here but at the office of the Dhillons. “We are putting up computers, LCDs and other gadgets in the war-room to run our social media campaign. We will engage volunteers from each district. I will oversee its functioning,” Amarinder told HT.

The party has been forced to “virtually” shed its old election strategies to combat Arvind Kejriwal’s party, which is mopping up crowds, funds and supporters via social media. The AAP has set up its social media war-room comprising youth from Ivy-league universities, such as Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge, besides top honchos, who are fine-tuning its poll strategy for Punjab, along with Kejriwal’s team in New Delhi.