 "Guarantee cards: Cong’s path to poll redemption")
For a party that felt deflated after December 3, 2023, when it lost the Assembly polls in the three Hindi heartland states, the unrelenting demands from its candidates to supply them with more of the Congress’ guarantee cards has put the spring back in the step of Congress strategists and incharges of its war rooms, who work out of a bungalow in central Delhi’s leafy Lodhi Estate, and smaller ones in state capitals across the country.
The Congress is on course to distribute 30 million ‘guarantee cards’, which carry details of its 25 guarantees and plans to distribute as many as 80 million of such cards by the time campaigning ends for the seventh phase on the evening of May 30.
Congress leaders say their party is facing an acute resource crunch and has preferred to focus its resources on 125-130 ‘winnable’ seats across the country, including the 52 it won in 2019.
With it fielding candidates in a little over 300 seats, the Congress has contested the least number of Lok Sabha (LS) seats since 1951-52. The Congress, assisted by election strategist Sunil Kanugolu’s Inclusive Minds, has engaged coordinators for each of the 75 seats it believes it could win in addition to the 52 it won in 2019. Sasikanth Senthil, a former Karnataka cadre Indian Administrative Services officer who quit in 2019, is in charge of the Congress war room.
In contrast, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) commands a massive election machinery, which is proof of its mammoth organisational strength. The party operates from two modern multistoried buildings on Deendayal Upadhyaya Marg in the national capital. It also continues to run its war room from the Lutyens bungalows on Ashoka Road, one of which previously housed its national headquarters.
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The BJP has dozens of call centres devoted to the needs of its candidates on these seats. In addition, over 200 call centres were set up by November to phone voters and recruit workers.
The BJP collates crucial feedback and engages with party workers through its Saral, or Sangathan Reporting and Analysis, application (app). The latest version of the app, introduced on April 17, has had over 1 million downloads, while its earlier versions were downloaded several million times.
In 2019, the BJP, aided by Jarvis Consulting, deployed 190 call centres.
According to Jarvis Consulting, it had 15,500 team members and reached out to 320 million people during the LS election campaign five years back. The BJP and Jarvis scaled up the operations for the 2024 polls, with as many as 20,000 workers handling its call centres round the clock since December, party sources said.
Five years back, the BJP’s call centres reached out to the beneficiaries of the welfare schemes launched by the party’s government at the Centre.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi would even meet some of the beneficiaries, or labharthis, at his election rallies in a particular area, a strategy to convey to the people that the schemes would continue if Modi returned.
The BJP has continued to hone that strategy, and there were beneficiaries of the schemes from the ‘four pillars’ — women, farmers, the poor, and the youth — who met Modi when he launched the BJP’s manifesto.
