A virtual cyber war has begun between BJP and Congress ahead of the Gujarat assembly polls, with both parties invading the social networking sites YouTube and Orkut like never before.This is the first-of-its-kind election campaign, where both the parties are going all out to make full use of the Internet to reach out to increasing number of cyber-savvy voters.Synopsis of speeches of leaders and campaign material uploaded on the net, floating of fan clubs, e-mail campaigns, net-generated bulk SMSes and online surveys - parties are not leaving anything to chance in their attempt to have an upper hand in the emerging arena of e-campaigning.The BJP started its hi-tech poll campaign ahead of the rival Congress and seemingly has established a small lead. The Congress has followed suit and aims to catch up with the ruling BJP soon.Numerous speeches of Chief Minister Narendra Modi have been uploaded on the popular Internet video site YouTube. Not only that, what the business leaders of the country – Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Anil Ambani and others - have to say about Modi too have also been made available on the site."Number of users of Internet and mobiles has gone up in the country and India stands at number five in the world in term of net users. The BJP has decided to reach to the tech-savvy people through Internet," said Shashiranjan Yadav, who is looking after the BJP's high-tech campaign."In the past 15 days, we have uploaded a series of e-materials on the net. The whole concept has been a success with the net-users and so far we have had a hit of over 10,000," Yadav said."There are at least 60 fan clubs of Chief Minister Modi on the social networking site Orkut, and more and more people are joining," Yadav said.The websites of the BJP like bjpguj.org, narendramodi.com, fansofnarendramodi.com, are having 1,000 hits per day."The response and feedback that we are receiving are satisfying. The e-campaigning is a thought-provoking process on a free media like the Internet," he said.Yadav claimed the BJP is far ahead of the Congress in the e-campaigning front as the latter in Gujarat is on trail having uploaded only videos of recently-held "Mahila Samman Samellan" addressed by its president Sonia Gandhi and speeches of state GPCC chief Bharat Solanki."We are giving a tough fight to the BJP in e-campaigning," Congress' Manish Doshi said."Apart from uploading video footages on important sites, we are also carrying out online survey on Orkut. We have asked net users to fill up a form and the response to it is good," Doshi said."The party has also put up an advertisement of 30 seconds on many websites. We are using computers to generate bulk SMSes to the people," he said.
