The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Doctors lead BJP, Cong Goa diagnosis: Go micro, win macro
HOW THE CAMPAIGN IS RUN
‘Booth jeeto, desh jeeto’
AT PERNEM, right before she took the microphone on Thursday, a clove-flavoured ayurvedic throat cleanser was slipped into Union minister Smriti Irani’s hands. Campaign management can be a lot of things, and if one were to sit with Dr Rajendra Phadke, he will tell you that sometimes it can be as crucial as a “timely clove”.
A “Pramod Mahajan alumnus”, Phadke, a trained doctor, is the man the BJP and Manohar Parrikar has chosen to win Goa. Having conducted several state elections in north and west India, Phadke is a member of the party’s campaign core committee along with several others from Maharashtra, Karnataka and other BJP states to help shape the Goa campaign.
Inside the BJP election office, Phadke is busy overseeing a team of six BJP workers from Aurangabad, Maharashtra. The team is setting up a call centre with multiple phone lines. In two days, they would have made multiple calls (at least 2,000 in a single shift) to booth in-charges of the state’s 40 constituencies as they mobilise crowd for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally on Saturday.
They are following the BJP style of functioning — “booth jeeto, desh jeeto”, Phadke says.
The BJP is contesting 36 seats, but the booth management covers the entire state. The average voter turnout per booth is 650, and the state has 1,642 voting booths. “We are first calling the booth nodals to get crowd for the rally,” Phadke says. Every shift, the figures will be updated and follow-ups taken. The party expects a turnout of 50,000. Overseeing elections since the 1990s, Phadke, who carries all sorts of medicines for BJP workers, says the mood remains the same but the functioning is “very fastphased” now. He has just figured six Whatsapp groups, percolating to the lowest party worker — where in the next five days voice messages of Narendra Modi, Manohar Parrikar and other party leaders will be broadcast. “Elections are about motivation, constant support,” he says.
Party office in-charge Ravindra Sathe, a Mumbaikar, has the logistics and plans for various departments that will work until the last vote is cast — social media cell, logistics, women’s cell, etc. In the room are people mapping mood of the voters, starting with the “interest shown to come for Modi rally”.
Having arrived in October 2016, Phadke says his early “patrolling days” were spent with locals gauging the “BJP mood”. His diaries, listing demographics, can put a statistician to shame. Flagged across each constituencies are voter profiles, their communities, and identity details. “If I am told that the locals in one constituency are Kannada speakers, I have the detail of which region of Karnataka they come from. No election planning can be done without getting these details right,” he says.
The team says even the star campaigners have been picked and put in constituencies matching their language and background. Smriti Irani, for instance, was allocated Calangute as she is familiar with work there, while Ananth Kumar went to a belt with Karnataka demographics.
Every detail in the office is in writing “There is no way you will say you were not told. If I need crowd on the ground, voters in the booth, I need everything marked and written,” says Phadke as he scolds a worker who delayed on a work promise. His diaries, similarly, have minute detailing until February 4. “Parrikar saw the diary I had kept in 2012 election and said I am being dispatched to Goa since I have a work-diary like this,” he laughs.
The 2012 notes have the voting patterns, booth ratios, booths BJP won, ones it lost, and every “microscopic detail”. CONGRESS LEADER Digvijaya Singh recalls an election rally of Sanjay Gandhi in 1977. “The biggest I have seen —10 lakh crowd in Bhopal,” he says. “We were wiped out that election. So do not talk to me about rallies.”
Singh says this Goa election for the Congress is about “door-to-door campaigning”. Singh says its mostly a low-key campaign with focus on grassroots-level infrastructure, instead of scaling public meetings.
Singh has just seen Sachin Pilot off, and is busy looking forward for the next speaker.
Alongwithdrchellakumar,aiccsecretary inchargeofgoaandkarnataka,singhhasbeen assigned Goa elections by the party. Rahul Gandhi’s public meeting on January 30 has been strategically planned at Mapusa, says M Kshaikh,aretiredprincipalandnowvice-presidentofgoacongress—“alittleclosertotheinteriors, still close to the capital, so that the impact is felt across, right till the hinterland.”
A trained doctor, Chellakumar, a Tamil Nadu native and a former MLA, has been “studying Goa for three years” now. Travelling between Chennai, Bengaluru and Goa, he has his own “list of Goan traits”. Prepared between these three men, Rahul’s talking points have sourced all the “failures” of the BJP government in the state. “We call it the chargesheet,” says Chellakumar.
Passes are being ironed and crowd estimates being worked for the Rahul Gandhi rally: Chellakumar expects 50,000; Shaikh, a Goan, picks 30,000 as a “practical” number. One schedule the election team worked around was the afternoon lunch. “The Goan likes his fish curry, and nothing in the world is more important than that,” Shaikh says. “So we had to work around the time limits.”
Candidates have been called and proper assessments will be done early Sunday morning. At the offices they are debating on the number of buses to be pulled, 150 being the last figure. “The potential of each candidate has been assessed,” Shaikh says, “and each has been given a crowd figure to match.”
Between the AICC and GPCC, the party’s Goa wing, they agree the style of mobilising changed since 2014, soon after Luizinho Faleiro took over as GPCC president. “The first step we took was to reverse the set-up and look for booth committees, with block committees guiding them,” Shaikh says.
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