CHANDIGARH: For this young software engineer settled in Coventry area of the United Kingdom, Monday was special in many ways. It was May Day and a bank holiday in UK and the last day of campaigning in Amethi and Varanasi back home.
So Mandeep Singh Brar, whose parents hail from Faridkot, tried hard to outdo the other 960 AAP volunteers in the area to call up potential voters in the two crucial constituencies in far away Uttar Pradesh to convince them to elect Kumar Vishwas (Amethi) and Arvind Kejriwal (Varanasi), two key leaders of the party as part of the voluntary engagement programme. More than 1,000 calls were being made daily to these constituencies from UK.
Harpreet Singh, a management consultant from UK, is another ardent AAP supporter and was part of a team that made 22,000 calls during Delhi assembly elections, said he had opted for Punjab and UP as part of the “Support A State” (SAS) programme of AAP.
“When I came down to Delhi during the elections, voters told me they had saved numbers of NRIs who had called them. There is a personal touch to such messages which cannot be achieved by paid pre-recorded ones. Sometimes people ask us whether they are talking to a machine. We try to answer all their queries and it works,” he says.
The reasons vary – some agree with AAP’s ideology, others accuse Kejriwal of not running the Delhi government for its full term. “There are nasty experiences sometimes, some voters even weep over the phone, narrating tales of the corrupt system around them. There are all sorts of people,” he said.
Elaborating on how the system works, Brar said, “AAP’s IT cell has been providing us with lists of numbers on the official portal and we have the option to call up directly from our numbers or connect with voters through a call centre set up by them locally.”
“An overseas call is taken more seriously, given the fact that someone far away cared to take out time to share some thoughts with a voter. Besides, some convincing arguments why AAP stands out as a party are enough to expect a favourable response,” he added.
At the same time, AAP supporters like Raj Malhotra, who hails from Hoshiarpur, says he is missing from action after Punjab went to polls due to his language handicap. “I don’t have good command over Hindi and have been holding myself back from the calling campaign. But my friends and I were active during Punjab campaigning,” he said.
How it works
The calling is divided into two categories – quality calling to voters who have already registered at earlier campaigns and only need to be brought in contact with the local units to assign them voluntary tasks and quantity calling to unknown voters asking them to vote for AAP. “An appeal for votes doesn’t last more than 30 minutes unless the voter wants to seek information about the candidate or the party,” said the overseas
Source: IANS