‘War Room’: Congress govt’s ears and voice in Chhattisgarh ahead of polls

Away from the cacophonic rhetoric of election rallies, a team of over 300 youths, with an average age of 25 years, spend 12 hours a day, split into two shifts, at a three-storied building. Members of the team make or receive over 20,000 calls a day, calmly inquiring about the ever-dynamic ground realities of the election season, generating social media campaigns, combating fake news, collecting real-time feedback from the polling booth level and upwards on the day’s prevailing electoral buzz, and even collating “intelligence” on the activities of leaders disgruntled at being denied a chance to contest elections and their sabotage attempts, if any.

This is the Congress party’s Election War Room in Avanti Vihar locality of Chhattisgarh’s Raipur. A quiet confidence prevails here over the party’s victory prospects in the upcoming Assembly polls amid a flurry of activity. The only “noise” one can hear is the playful chatter of volunteers — a healthy mix of young men and women, most of them from Raipur — as they move about between the different rooms and floors of the building, exchanging notes and taking instructions on what to do next.

There are even 19 small rooms to provide accommodation to a handful of volunteers who, for the duration of the election, have been handpicked by the Congress to stay at the War Room 24/7, just in case there’s a major poll-related development at an ungodly hour that needs to be kept track of or some fake news going viral on social media, which needs to be immediately debunked. There’s even a tiny studio where videos for the party’s social media campaigns can be shot and edited in-house without losing precious time.

Leaving “nothing to chance”

“We had started with a small war room that had less than half the number of people who currently work with us ahead of the 2018 Assembly polls but what we have today is a far more advanced set-up with multiple verticals, which caters to every aspect of the election. The basic idea is to leave nothing to chance,” said Ayush Pandey, national coordinator of the party’s social media team, who handles the day-to-day operations of the Congress War Room in Raipur.

Pandey told The Federal that since being set up in 2018, the War Room had outgrown its original purpose and, over the last five years of the party’s Bhupesh Baghel-led government, had also become a “valuable resource centre”. “Currently, our entire focus, of course, is on the election, but the War Room has been fully functional since May,” Pandey said, adding that the volunteers had begun their ground work six months ago through the “call centre” that is one of the most important features of the War Room.

Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, who is seeking a renewed mandate for the Congress that had swept the state in the 2018 polls following a 15-year reign of the BJP, had realized long ago, and perhaps with the borrowed experience of any number of other chief ministers who had failed to earn their respective parties a new term in office, that merely rolling out populist welfare schemes is no guarantee of retaining power. The War Room was, thus, repurposed to function as an important appendage of his government that functions independently of bureaucratic red tape and inertia to collect regular feedback directly from intended beneficiaries of his regime’s schemes.

Spreading awareness about schemes

“We have volunteers on the ground, most of them drawn from our party cadres and frontal organisations like the Youth Congress, NSUI, and Sewa Dal and even members of the Rajiv Gandhi Yuva Mitan Clubs (a government scheme for youth engagement) who are constantly on tours of every village and block of the state to spread awareness about the government’s schemes. These volunteers also double up as members of the War Room whose job is to keep us informed of the actual penetration of our schemes at the ground level,” Pandey said.

He added, “If a volunteer visits a household that is entitled to one or more schemes but has, for some reason, not been included as a beneficiary, we are immediately informed and we process that information and inform the government department concerned so that the individual or household can be immediately enlisted for the scheme. Likewise, the volunteer network also informs us of households that have been added as beneficiaries and whether or not they are receiving the benefits of the scheme regularly. This network has given us a complete database of beneficiaries and it helps us on two fronts — the party can formulate its election outreach in a better way and the government remains informed of whether or not its schemes are reaching the intended beneficiaries.”

The workload of the War Room has expectedly doubled during the poll season. While the compilation of the database of beneficiaries of the Baghel government’s schemes may have given the Congress a head start in its public outreach efforts, there are other aspects that can be addressed by the War Room volunteers only during elections.

“There are social media and other conventional campaigns that the party had prepared for the elections in advance but there are other campaigns that we could have finalised only after the elections were actually announced. These include rebutting charges made of a daily basis, real or fake, by the BJP and its leaders, as well as campaigns tailormade for individual candidates, constituencies, regions of the states, and different blocs of the electorate or those that are linked with our election manifesto. These are also prepared at the War Room,” said Vinod Verma, political adviser to Baghel, who also oversees activities of the War Room.

“Collection of political intelligence”

There is also another aspect of the War Room that has assumed immense significance for the Congress this election season and one that its critics may dub as being a case of not-so-kosher political surveillance against rivals and its own. This has to do with “collection of political intelligence”, which Pandey described as “an essential part of poll preparations”.

Besides conducting regular surveys of the changing political mood in each Assembly segment of the state since the party declared its candidates, the War Room volunteers spread across Chhattisgarh’s 90 constituencies also keep the party leadership informed of the activities of BJP’s campaign and, more importantly, of those Congress leaders who had demanded a party ticket but lost out to another leader.

“There is nothing wrong about this,” said Pandey, asserting that “gathering political intelligence doesn’t mean that we are bugging phones and houses”. He explained that the task of volunteers roped in for the political intelligence vertical is to “simply keep an eye on what BJP or JCC (Amit Jogi’s Janta Congress Chhattisgarh) and other political parties or some of our own leaders who are unhappy a being denied tickets are doing in different constituencies.”

“If a Congress leader who was a ticket aspirant but lost out to someone else is meeting with our rivals or is not cooperating with our official candidate in the campaign, then the volunteers inform the War Room and we convey this to the party leadership. Some disgruntled leaders merely want the party leadership to reach out to them after they were denied a ticket but because of the hectic poll-time schedule of senior leaders, this may not have happened. So, we basically pass on the message that the CM or party chief or some other senior leader needs to speak to that leader. If there is sabotage, disciplinary action needs to be taken and correctives need to be applied in the campaign, so we pass on that message too,” Pandey added.

So, what is the War Room’s assessment of the likely outcome of the election that is due in two phases, on November 7 and November 17? “We are confident that the party will win but there is no room for complacency. There are some concerns in areas where we have denied incumbent MLAs a ticket (there are 22 such assembly segments). We are also aware that in the tribal-dominated regions of north Chhattisgarh and Bastar (south Chhattisgarh), we had peaked in 2018 and so we have to ensure that we don’t lose our sitting seats in these regions while in central Chhattisgarh, where the BJP has traditionally been strong, we have to make sure that previous voting trends change in our favour this time. Our assessment is we will have a comfortable victory, so that is not in doubt for me. What I would be interested in is in the number of seats we get above the simple majority mark of 46 seats (in the assembly),” said Verma, predictably without giving away the numbers that the War Room has scrambled so far.