Campaign planning to monitoring social media for each candidate: What goes on inside ‘war rooms’ of three parties in poll fray

While the AAP has five war rooms, the Congress has three. The BJP, meanwhile, has set up a network of around 230

war rooms across Delhi’s seven constituencies.

The AAP’s main war room is at its DDU Marg office, where 25-30 party workers are divided into four groups — one each for their four candidates. The party has entered into a 4:3 seat-sharing arrangement with Congress, its INDIA bloc ally, in the Capital.

“In addition to this, there are four more war rooms — one in each constituency where AAP candidates are contesting. The ideas behind our nudge campaigns, such as nukkad nataks and dance for democracy taking place in buses and metros, the campaign against ‘BJP’s washing machine’ emerged from here,” AAP Delhi convener Gopal Rai said. These war rooms are operating 24×7.

Rai further said as poll day nears, more “war rooms will be set up in each assembly segment in the four constituencies (South, East, West and New Delhi)”. Their major role will be election day management. “They will urge voters to cast their vote,” he said, adding that these will have the most volunteers as they will include all booth-level workers.

Despite repeated requests, AAP did not give access to any of its war rooms.

Unlike AAP, the BJP does not have a war room at its main Delhi office.

“We have a state unit, seven Lok Sabha units, and units in each assembly segment. The state unit transfers information to Lok Sabha units, which sends it to the assembly units. These units are responsible for disseminating information to party workers assigned to all 1,300 booths,” said a source associated with the party’s IT department.

“There are also 78 social media units circulating information on platforms like WhatsApp, X, and, partly, Instagram,” he said, adding that the war rooms operate in double shifts from 7 am to 10 pm every day.

According to sources managing these war rooms, social media units are of primary importance. Its employees spread messages through WhatsApp and make calls.

Additionally, there are 10 units to manage election programmes; two units for senior leaders’ programmes; and a unit for each candidate.

“Candidates can’t go everywhere so party workers campaign on their behalf,” sources said. “There are 70 war rooms exclusively for organising programmes by party workers”.

The BJP Delhi unit also did not provide access to any of its war rooms.

The Congress war room, in the basement of its Delhi office at DDU Marg, monitors the campaign in the three constituencies it has fielded candidates. It has a second war room in Model Town which oversees the campaign of Chandni Chowk candidate J P Agarwal. The party did not reveal the location of its third war room set up in Northeast Delhi for its candidate, Kanhaiya Kumar.

Jitender Kumar Kochar, overseeing the Chandni Chowk control room, said these rooms are also involved in obtaining meeting permits and communicating candidates’ messages to workers.

Congress’s Northwest Delhi candidate Udit Raj has hired an agency to carry out daily surveys in his constituency.

“The idea is to replicate BJP’s campaign. We have identified booths and divided them into four categories — booths where we expect a landslide win; where winning margin is going to be between 5-10%; where we have a close fight; and booths where the trailing margin is between 10-15%. To secure authentic data, we’ve been conducting daily surveys. We find out who among the voters in these booths are pro-BJP, pro-Congress, pro-AAP; those who have a positive or negative opinion of Raj; and those who are pro and against the INDIA bloc… this data is being used to decide all our campaign strategies,” an executive of the political consultancy that handles Raj’s campaign said.

The Congress did provide access to its war room, where workers and volunteers were manning the phone lines.

One of the volunteers, Seema Chakraborty, a retired government school teacher, was calling each party worker assigned booth duties in previous elections to ascertain if they were still with the Congress. Pushpa Rani, a party worker for the past 25 years, called voters to ascertain their opinions and give them the party’s perspective on important issues.

Some volunteers ran and monitored social media campaigns. “At this moment, Kanhaiya Kumar’s social media has the best public engagement,” team member Vikas Jain said.

Geet Sethi, who runs Agarwal’s social media campaign, said they have around 500 WhatsApp groups in Chandni Chowk. “Our campaign is focused on telling people positive things about Congress. We don’t believe in negative campaigning,” he said.