How technology helped BJP to win the 2014 election?

By Nishant Elections are always important for any nation as it decides which individual or political party would be governing it in for the stipulated period of time after election results are declared. In this article, we will see how BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) one of the political party in India won the Indian General elections, 2014 by leveraging technology in its election campaign. This provides a glimpse as how one can leverage technology to reach out to people. BJP knew that how successful it is in communicating with its party workers at the grass root level is going to decide its fate in the 2014 election. Therefore BJP as a political party first ensured that communication within the party is consistent and strong. This in turn helped it to create fruitful program to reach out to voters by tactically using technology. BJP reinforced 3P’s: a)      Processes using technology b)      Programs to reach out to voters c)       People, i.e., its IT team for the 2014 election This proved to be a crucial strategy for the party to win the 2014 election. The party successfully used PPT model which consisted of people, process and technology. BJP’s method of keeping ‘people first’ helped in inspiring its party workers at the grass root level and in fetching uncorrupted data from them. This data in turn was leveraged by party workers during direct election campaigns. The IT team of BJP did lot of work to connect senior party leaders with the party workers. Various tools were used by the IT team e.g. Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp to ensure that communication is dissipated from top to bottom echelons of the party in a short span of time. It took at most 210 seconds and 19 seconds at the least for communication to dissipate from national ranks to ground level party workers. The party used internet to achieve momentum at the right time for the election. It employed services of IT companies like Oracle and SAP to do real time analysis of data from social media so as to build appropriate campaign strategy in reaching out to voters and motivating them to vote for BJP. It also worked with InMobi to send profiles of the party applicants for the 2014 election to the mobile users. BJP was also able to reduce influence of the news channels through its use of technology. It was able to grasp the emotions of the voters at the right time and accordingly adjusted and modified its campaign strategies to not only convince voters but also get their support and vote in the 2014 election. Technology was not just another tool for the BJP but an effective ploy to judge voters’ emotions and expectations from the campaigning parties which helped it in emerging as the single largest party after the election. BJP also became the first party after the 1984 election to win enough seats to rule without support from other parties. Further readings: http://www.governancenow.com/news/regular-story/how-bjp-used-technology-reach-grassroots-and-win-polls http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-06-18/news/50679153_1_software-firm-bjp-inmobi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_general_election,_2014