Did an aggressive online and ground campaign by the Aam Admi Party Party play a role in Delhi's record-breaking turnout?
As the queues outside polling stations across Delhi stretched late into a winter evening, and the turnout steadily climbed, so did the levels of infectious energy at the offices of the Aam Admi Party. Here in the midst of organised chaos, the AAP's online coordinators tell us they are convinced that the rising turnout is linked to their social media campaign.
The AAP's Somu Sundaram says, "I think technology has been our saviour. Without social media, I believe we could not reach out to these many people."
While that correlation is contentious, there is little doubt that the AAP's online presence has been formidable. On Twitter, multiple hashtags like #AAPSweepingDelhi and #VoteforAAP popped up as top trends several days before voting, unseating the BJP, which has traditionally dominated social media, especially twitter trends. The AAP's Ankit Lal claimed that about 60,000 tweets were sent out with pro-AAP hashtags starting December 1, peaking on December 4 voting day with 24,000 tweets. NDTV has no independent way of verifying those claims.
Sundaram denied suggestions that his party was using an army of paid tweeters to boost their online presence. He says they have a core team of about 200 online volunteers, and a more loose-knit volunteer pool of 1000 others. The technology behind the final push came from an online application called Thunderclap. Lal says, "What it does is it asks people if there is a message, and that message is the campaign. In our case it said 'I am voting for the AAP and my friends and family too. What about you?' And once people signed up using their Facebook and Twitter account actually they were donating that message on their timelines and we ran this build to Thunderclap for about two weeks, so the Thunderclap message was going to mature on I think at 4 pm on 2nd December, which was before an hour from campaign's closing time. By that time we had reached about 35 lakh people through the Thunderclap message."
On the same day, December 4, the Facebook page of AAP founder Arvind Kejriwal hit a million likes. Sundaram says that a post by Kejriwal sent on the morning of voting day asking people to fast till they have voted went viral.
Surprisingly the AAP's only online challenge came not from the BJP, but the Congress. Pro-Congress hashtags like #Vote4Sheila also hit the top spot on voting day, which the Congress claims is because the party has decided to take social media seriously.
The BJP's Arvind Gupta denied that his party failed to make an impact during Delhi elections, claiming that the #VoteForDrSaheb hashtag in favour of their chief ministerial candidate, Dr Harsh Vardhan, did reasonably well.
Dr Harsh Vardhan's personal Twitter account has about 19,000 followers. Another account, called DrHarshVardhan4CM, has only 24 followers at last count. By contrast, Arvind Kejriwal has 7.7 lakh followers on Twitter.
Of course, there are serious doubts whether these online campaigns translate into high turnouts, or guaranteed votes. Sundaram claims it does. Delhi he says has approximately 60 lakh Facebook users, which might seem like a sizeable chunk of the 1.5 crore electorate. But there is no way of knowing how many Facebook users are registered voters, nor has any study been done to determine a linkage between social media use and voting habits.
The only evidence available is anecdotal. First time voters we spoke to outside polling booths presented a nuanced reality. Quite a few of them said that they had been influenced or made aware of political choices via social media.
But several also said they aren't social media users, rubbishing the role of Twitter and Facebook. A good number said they had been drawn by the on ground campaign of the different political parties, especially AAP's.
The 'wave' of support for AAP visible online was not immediately apparent on the ground, with voices speaking in favour of all parties, with a fair number saying they would vote for the BJP.
At AAP's HQ, many say they are fully aware that social media can at best be a complement to a ground campaign. For this, the party sought the help of Ashish Talwar, an ex-member of the Congress- an odd choice given the AAP's aversion to the traditional political parties. Talwar says he had quit the Congress several years before he joined AAP.
Talwar explained how the party had divided each assembly constituency into zones, as opposed to the traditional divisions of municipal wards. Each seat has 3-4 wards, while the AAP created about a dozen zones per seat, to increase the intensity of their campaign. The zones were managed by a core team of volunteers drawn from the Lok Pal Andolan and the Bijli Andolan, for cheaper electricity. As these core volunteers went door to door they would ask voters if they were willing to contribute more time to the AAP, thereby recruiting a larger pool of supporters.
This pool was used by the AAP to manage booths, a crucial aspect of election management. Each of Delhi's 70 seats has roughly 150-200 voting booths, making for about 11,000 booths in all. Established parties like the Congress and the BJP have well-entrenched networks of booth in-charges, and claim they have an edge over the AAP when it comes to the micromanagement of an election.
But the AAP claims that by voting day, they had a pool of nearly 20,000 volunteers in place to man booths. Prior to D-day they underwent an intensive bout of training under the supervision of TN Panchapakesan, the former CEO of an outsourcing company Eureka OSL.
On voting day, calls from these AAP volunteers poured into headquarters, where they were received by other volunteers.
Preeti Menon, who heads an all-woman's taxi service in Mumbai was among those receiving calls. She said, "Our volunteers are saying that in Motinagar, Shakur basti, Mangolpuri, Bawana and Trinagar we had a huge turnout. We had BJP people entering the booth and stuff like that. So they just kept on reporting what is going on there." At hand to deal with complaints were members of the AAP's legal cell, who were passing on details to the Election Commission.
The exact reasons for Delhi's high turnout will remain unclear, perhaps even after the results are declared - anger against price rise, anti-incumbency, a more efficient revision of electoral rolls by the Election Commission are all potential factors.
But it is fair to say that the mix of a vibrant virtual and ground campaign by the newest kid on the political block may have well been one of the factors in bringing out large numbers of the city's residents.
Another AAP volunteer, Gaurav Gupta, an IIM graduate who is now in the corporate sector says he feels that being part of the campaign has brought 'politics within touching distance.'