Gujarat Assembly polls: BJP's social media war room in action as polling day approaches

By Ankur Gupta
Ahmedabad (Gujarat) [India], November 19 : A full-fledged centralised social media war room has been set up in Ahmedabad by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) owing to the upcoming assembly elections, from where the social media volunteers - observe social media accounts of the opposition parties, create, react on various hot topics around the political scenario in the state and share the same to more than 50,000 groups on WhatsApp.
Dr Pankaj Shukla, State Co-ordinator of IT and Social Media for BJP told ANI, "We have made this social media war room at the BJP Media Centre especially for the elections, where more than 100 social media warriors (volunteers) are working and more than 10000 responsible Karyakartas are working across the state."

The social media cell of the BJP is active 365 days but owing to the elections, this special war room has been created where the social media warriors, as the party calls them, will hustle to create and share content, messages and reels on social media platforms throughout the day.
"We observe and share the day-to-day campaigns with the people as well as different types of content created by the party," Shukla added.
The warriors work to share the content with 50,000 Whatsapp groups across the state and they also handle all the social media handles of the state account - BJP4Gujarat. The social media warriors also handle the district pages of the state and post on those accounts as well.

The social media war room also works to share important parts of the speeches of the national leaders during their campaigning in the state including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP National President JP Nadda, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel, State president CR Paatil and others.

"The social media war room follows a strategy depending upon the topics that are trending in politics. They observe the statements of the Opposition parties against the BJP and create videos and memes in reply to it and share the same on various social media platforms. They also make hashtags and more than 10,000 karyakartas share the same, hence they trend the hashtags," stated the state Co-ordinator.
Kalpesh, South Zone incharge at the war room said, "We also observe what the Opposition says about the BJP leaders and accordingly make videos of that particular leader in reply to the accusation and share it."

Gujarat where the ruling party which has been in power for over 27 years will be seeking its seventh term in office.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been Gujarat's longest-serving chief minister from 2001 till 2014.
The state has been a BJP stronghold for a long and the party has set its sight on returning to power with a handsome majority this time as well.
However, it faces a stiff electoral challenge from the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has named Isudan Gadhvi as its chief ministerial candidate.
Congress is also hoping to put its best electoral foot forward to unseat the BJP government.
The state of Gujarat which has 182 assembly constituencies will go for polling in two phases on December 1 and 5. The counting of votes will occur on December 8, which coincides with Himachal Pradesh's result date.