BJP PLANS A WHATSAPP CAMPAIGN FOR 2019 POLLS

Meet the “cellphone pramukh” , a key player in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign for 2019.

Around 900,000 of them, one for each polling booth or station (there are 927,533) , will drive the party’s extensive WhatsAppbased campaign for parliamentary election, circulating specially designed campaign material — video, audio, text, graphic and cartoons, according to two persons familiar with the matter .

Each of these pramukhs will be given a smartphone.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi met a group of senior BJP leaders about three weeks back where the details of this campaign were presented to them by a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office, the first person said, asking not to be identified.

A “booth action plan” prepared by party president Amit Shah has already asked state units to compile the list of smartphone-carrying voters in every polling station.

Once this list is ready, the party’s war room in its old HQ located in Delhi’s Ashoka Road will get into the act of integrating it with the proposed programme.

Party leaders — MPs, MLAs, other elected representatives and office bearers — will be asked to identify these cellphone pramukhs in the first round; the pramukhs will then create three WhatsApp groups for each polling station, with each group consisting of 256 persons, according to the plan.