Poll strategy: If one Facebook profile doesn’t work,10 might

However,that is about where the good news about this year’s DUSU campaign ends. As an expected 40 per cent of Delhi University lines up to vote on Friday,organisations would have used the same old bag of tricks to help voters make up their minds.

“Nothing has changed this year,” is what Abhinav,who has pulled the campaign strings of small player Disha,reacts first. “Movie tickets for Hello Darling were distributed in Zakir Husain and Dyal Singh on Wednesday. Rain dance parties took place in Royal Palace,Vijay Nagar. The only change is that this time the parties were held in early August,before the code of conduct was enforced,” he says. He also observes that the big fish have found a way to circumvent the rule about hand-made posters. “They have resorted to screen-printing. Instead of generating posters on the computer,they have used lettering to give it a handwritten feel.”

ABVP,on the other hand,is not ready to be complacent about having a majority in the current DUSU and has made itself visible to the online community. “We have a team dedicated to updating Facebook profiles of our candidates. Each of them has given us their login id and password,and the team puts up pamphlets,campaign photos and status updates every night,” says Shreerang Kulkarni,in-charge of the ABVPs online team. Except its joint secretary candidate A A Pandit Saurabh Uniyal,every other ABVP candidate has a page as well as a profile on Facebook. Of course,Neetu Dabas has three pages of her own.

“It is not that we do not want to have a prominent online profile. It is just that we cannot afford to spare a dedicated team to do the job,” says the spokesperson of a prominent Left organisation. Newsline could not even find most DUSU candidates on Facebook — three ABVP candidates,AISF’s presidential candidate Aparajitha Raja and SFI’s vice-presidential candidate Atul Chandra being exceptions.

Something seems to suggest a love for the good,old way of doing things. NSUI,for instance,took a risk by daring to reserve a post for a Scheduled Caste candidate. However,things have not turned out bad,according to sources. “His name is Akshay Kumar,and is proving to be a hit among the girls. It also helps that he is quite good-looking and has long hair,” an NSUI leader got candid.