Party has learnt lessons from 2014 and its IT cell in U’khand is now taking on BJP on FB, Twitter
Suffering ignominy at the hands of the BJP for more than three years, the Congress finally has woken up to the challenge on social media, the virtual arena for elections in the 21st century, and is trying hard to match the BJP’s blitz in Uttarakhand.
In the IT room of the Congress’s state headquarters at Rajpur road in Dehradun, about eight young girls are busy tweeting and messaging on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook through their laptops and smartphones.
Today they are posting question no. 2 of the 30-question series that the Uttarakhand Congress began in the run-up to the Assembly elections. The poser on the Uttarakhand Congress’s Twitter handle @Itukpcc under #Dhol_ki_Pol has tagged the Uttarakhand BJP’s Twitter handle @BJP4UK and seeks answers as to why the excise duty on petrol was increased from Rs 9.48 to 21.48 per litre and on diesel from Rs 3.56 to Rs 17.33 per litre over the last 30 months, which resulted in extra tax burden of Rs 1,62,000 crore.
“We regret missing out on such a powerful tool in 2014 when the BJP used it so effectively. But today our social media campaign is one up on them and is putting them on the mat. They are silent on our searching posers,” says Amarjeet Singh, who handles the social media cell.
But engineer Ravindra, a BJP functionary who handles social media at the BJP state headquarters on Balbir Road, brushes off the Congress’ social media campaign as insignificant and rhetorical, saying it won’t have much of an impact.
“You look at their size of followers and ours. We are ahead of them both on Facebook and Twitter. Their followers are not even one-third our size in Uttarakhand. We have 1.36 lakh-plus followers on Facebook. Our #NautankibazzHarishRawat and #PappuInUttarakhand were the number 1 and number 2 trending hashtags,” Ravindra says.
Singh of the Congress admits that they have been a late starter, but claims that that their social media cell is making steady progress and is attacking the BJP with its logical posers based on facts.
“We are not doing jumlebaazi. Our presence on social media cannot be taken lightly now. Our #Dhol_Ki_Pol is troubling the BJP’s social media team, which is shirking away from our posers,” Singh says.
However, on both Facebook and Twitter, the BJP is still far ahead of the Congress. As against the Congress Facebook page @ukpcc.ddn, which has 43,388 followers, the easy-to-remember @BJP4UK has 1,36,623 followers.
Similarly, on Twitter, which the youth in Uttarakhand is not hooked on to much, the BJP, with 6,936 followers, leads the Congress’s 2,344 followers.
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