(LiveMint)
A week before Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Karnataka in February, a team of 10 social media experts and political strategists huddled inside the Bengaluru home of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state president B.S.Yeddyurappa.
The agenda was to devise an online strategy to target Gandhi’s imminent temple visit in the run-up to the 12 May polls. The deliberations, that had actually begun a few days before the meeting, ended with Yeddyurappa helping coin the term #ElectionHindu. “The campaign got traction of 300,000 people in eight hours and ran for two days,” one person directly involved in the meeting said, requesting not to be named.
The Congress has matched every round of this virtual bout punch-for-punch, and claimed a few knock-outs as well. In the run-up to the 2018 Karnataka assembly polls, the three major political parties—Congress, BJP and Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S)—have deployed considerable resources to strengthen their respective online platforms, especially after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, where a significant portion of the BJP’s success was attributed to its online campaigns.
