Your time starts now, Mr Kejriwal, say IIT students

The mood across IITs was jubilant as the landslide victory of Aam Admi Party unfolded Tuesday morning. Groups of students in IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay and IIT Kharagpur campuses have been seen cheering and greeting each other over AAP's phenomenal success. The celebrations went on till late night.

 A large number of students from India’s premier institutes have been supporting Arvind Kejrwal and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Delhi Assembly Elections.

While most of them have been part of the social media campaign of the AAP with devising vibrant and positive online campaign strategy which outsmarted the rival BJP, at least 300 of them had posted themselves at Delhi since past 10-15 days for door to door campaign which led to a huge turnout from the young and affluent class.

Kejriwal is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur (1989 batch) and hence many of the IITians, students and professors both, have a soft corner for him. His daughter Harshita is also a first year engineering student at IIT Delhi, a fact which mobilised a large number of students from IIT Delhi towards working for AAP.

IIT Bombay which has as many as 1,000 AAP sympathisers/donors was in the party mood Tuesday evening with dancing to the Kejriwal tune literally (A song composed by Bollywood musician Vishal Dadlani, an AAP supporter).

“Our hard works pays off. We hope AAP starts delivering on its promises now,” said Ratikant Nayak, an IIT Bombay research student who along with three other IITB students was campaigning for AAP in Delhi since past two weeks. A team of another dozen students handled the vibrant social media campaign of the AAP.

Lokesh Deshmukh who led the AAP’s campaign from from IIT Kharagpur said, “AAP supporters gave their 100% to see Kerjiwal as Delhi CM mainly because he presents the kind of politics which youth wants to see. People have very high hopes from him and he will have to fulfil all his promises. His time starts now.”

IIT Delhi student Abhishek Agrawal says, “We had supported the BJP in Lok Sabha elections with very high hopes from Narendra Modi but we didn’t not see any change in the country in past 9 months except religious intolerance promoted by right wing groups and Modi’s silence over it. Hope Kejriwal learns from BJP’s downfall.”

IITians have contributed a lot in AAP’s victory. IIT-B team, for instance, has created a research tool in November to measure public opinion on social media which had helped shape the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) election strategy in Delhi. They conducted a "sentiment analysis" to separate the negativity from the AAP campaign and suggesting the party to pick up issues as women's safety which was close to voters’ heart. Teams from other IITs also worked day and night adjusting their classes and creating videos for campaign, emailing and calling random voters and even donating from the pocket money.

“AAP made the best use of the social media platform defeating the BJP, a champion of social media user in the Lok Sabha elections,” says an observer. The vibrant and positive campaign helped AAP to dent BJP’s core vote bank en mass.

This also helped three-year-old party to regain its own vote bank which it had lost to the BJP after the Kejriwal's resignation from the Delhi’s chief minister post last year following a brief stint of 49 days.
 
 
AAP to push ‘Mission Maharashtra’ now

AAP will now expand its presence in Maharashtra. Ravi Shrivastav, the head of the north Maharashtra wing of AAP said, “We have already launched our Mission Maharashtra sometime back. The time has come to strengthen the mission. Our team has just come back from Delhi. We will start working on it in next few days.”