Booth-level armies to ABC of polling centres — Congress’ ‘silent’ campaign in Gujarat

For the past few months, Congress leaders, including former ministers, from neighbouring states have been working silently in Gujarat to mobilise ground-level support for the party

Congress candidate for Surat West, Sanjay Patwa, outside the party office | Photo: Manasi Phadke | ThePrint

Ahmedabad/Surat: Dressed in a stark white kurta pyjama, Sanjay Patwa seemed unfazed as he sunk into a plastic chair outside the Congress office in Surat’s Adajan Friday evening. That morning, Patva had filed his nomination as the Congress candidate for the Surat West constituency, a BJP bastion and the seat of State Cabinet Minister Purnesh Modi.

“I am a little less stressed than what our party’s candidates usually are at this point,” Patwa, a debutant contesting in the assembly polls, told ThePrint. “A lot of the work, which I usually would have been expected to do after being declared as a candidate, has already been done,” he said.

For the past four to six months, Congress MLAs, sitting and former ministers from Gujarat’s neighbouring states — Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh — as well as Chhatisgarh have been quietly coming to Gujarat, spending a few days in the districts that they have been assigned, and heading back just as furtively.

They have been working with state Congress leaders to appoint the party’s foot-soldiers, mark polling booths where the Congress is weak, identify influencers in these areas for party members to work with, and go door-to-door to convince voters of the Congress’ worth.

The ground-level campaigning of these ministers, MLAs and functionaries, the booth-level appointments, and work on polling station arithmetic is in a nutshell the “silent campaign” of the Congress that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had warned the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cadre about in his rally in the state last month.

The basic idea, party members admit, is to have a ground cadre in place that can compare with the BJP’s much-talked about behemoth network of panna pramukhs — members in charge of every page of the electoral roll — and panna samitis, which are committees under panna pramukhs that comprise of about five voters out of 30 on every page.

“Last election [in 2017], we were focusing more on the campaign narrative than our organisational structure. We were not as strong on our booth structure. This time, it is the opposite,” Hiren Banker, a Gujarat Congress spokesperson told ThePrint.

Another Gujarat Congress leader told ThePrint, “Until now, at most places, the candidate had to organise his ground structure and the booth-level workers. This time, we are giving a ready-made system to the candidate. He can only add to it.”

The ‘silent’ campaign

Ramlal Meena, an MLA from Rajasthan’s Pratapgarh constituency, is camped in Bardoli, Surat. He plans to stay till 1 December, the day of the election there as part of the first phase of the two-phased Gujarat assembly poll. The assembly constituency is currently held by the BJP, and the Congress candidate had lost here by a fat margin of 34,854 votes, as per Election Commission data.

“We have been going door-to-door here, asking people what they would like the Congress to do for them. I have been talking about some of the policies of the Congress government in Rajasthan and how we could get them to Gujarat,” Meena told ThePrint.

Moreover, he said, party workers have built a team of up to 25 people in every booth to spread the Congress’ message and to bring people out to vote.

The Congress has appointed someone like Meena, or more senior — an old timer, current or former minister — for each of the 26 Lok Sabha constituencies in Gujarat. Some constituencies have two such coordinators. For every outside leader, there is one Gujarat Congress leader working with him to coordinate with the state machinery, party leaders told ThePrint.

They would come in and go silently. “Even the media didn’t get a whiff of it,” the above-mentioned Congress leader who did not wish to be named said.

Similarly, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) has deputed one leader for each of Gujarat’s 182 assembly constituencies. All 182 leaders have a corresponding co-incharge from the Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee.

The same Congress leader said, “These leaders would go and report the ground conditions. The level of anti-incumbency, the issues that matter in the constituency, the caste factors and social engineering required. This feedback directly went to our regional in-charges.”

The Congress has appointed AICC office bearers as the regional in-charges — Usha Naidu for Gujarat’s central zone, B.M. Sandeep for the southern zone, Ramkrishna Ohja for the Saurashtra region and Virender Singh Rathore for North Gujarat.

The entire exercise also helped the Congress shortlist candidates based on winnability, party leaders said.

Congress’ booth-level infantry

Speaking to ThePrint, a Gujarat Youth Congress leader said, “The first task, when we started out about six months ago, was to identify booth volunteers. We had to find people committed enough to work till the last date of polling. They then started holding meetings polling station wise to train the booth volunteers. Every polling station has about five to ten booths each.”

The aim was to have one male and one female booth volunteer for each booth and ten people under each of them, he said. Then, every polling centre was given one sector in-charge. The party leaders on the ground then organised clusters of five polling stations into zones and appointed zonal in-charges.

Quite like the BJP’s system, Congress has also registered the name, photo, identification document and the contact details of each volunteer appointed to work for zones, polling centres and booths.

Multiple Congress leaders also elaborated on how the party has gone about targeting specific polling stations to improve its vote share in the assembly polls. Its vote share in Gujarat has hovered around 38 to 41 per cent for the past four assembly elections since 2002 as against the BJP’s 47 to 50 per cent, as per Election Commission data.

The ABC of polling stations

To work on its vote share, the party has classified polling centres in every constituency into A, B and C categories.

The A category centres are the ones that are definite wins for the Congress. The B category centres are where it could be touch-and-go for the Congress, or which the party has traditionally lost by slim margins. And the C category centres are the ones where the Congress is quite behind the BJP, losing by wide margins.

“We have been working to strengthen voting in A category centres. If the voting there is around 60 percent, we would like to bring it to 80 percent. Then we are trying to convert B category centres into A, and C into B,” the Youth Congress leader quoted above said.

Other than door-to-door campaigning, party leaders used different strategies in different constituencies to work on the latter categories as per the local factors there.

At some places, they tapped doctors, lawyers, teachers, who can typically be influencers in their community. At some other places, in urban areas, they roped in managements of housing societies, and in certain places where the caste influence is strong, they networked with the community leaders.

In Patwa’s Surat West constituency, for instance, the electorate is a mixture of various Hindu community sub-castes who largely live in localised clusters. “We have worked here on the basis of the caste calculations. We reached out to leaders of all castes who can be influencing figures for other members of their communities — Jains, Patidars, Dalits,” the Congress candidate said.

He describes his constituency as being in the “D category”, where the BJP’s victory margin at 77,553 has been so humongous that the Congress will be happy even if it narrows the margin.

“Our aim, of course, is victory,” Patwa clarified. “But, even getting five people to work in one booth for the 220 booths in my constituency was a big deal.”

But in this David-Goliath fight, Patwa is breathing a bit easy.

“One round of door-to-door campaigning has already been done. My visits will be a reinforcement,” he said.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)