New Delhi: Social Media campaigns to road rallies, everything played a very important role building an impactful image of AAP. Have you ever thought that a group of students would have planned strategies for AAP election campaigns?
Behind the Aam Aadmi Party's formidable pushback against the Bharatiya Janata Party riding the crest of the incredible Modi wave were a group of ten volunteers from IIT-B.
An enterprising group of ten volunteers at IIT-B, which created a research tool in November with the specific purpose of trawling tens of thousands of social media posts to measure public opinion, has helped shape the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) election strategy in the Delhi assembly election, which was held on Saturday.
The algorithm developed by the IIT-B group sifted through the language that constituted thousands of tweets to assess reactions to specific issues. It was also employed to determine the swing in the electorate's sentiment towards AAP at any given point of time.
Quoted by DNA, Divyank Agarwal, a fourth year student of Engineering Physics who was in the team that built the tool, says, "The program runs a word analysis on a database of many thousands of twitter handles and categorizes people's responses to particular events or issues as negative, weakly negative, neutral, weakly positive, or positive".
"Three or four volunteers would look over the scan manually and the results would be communicated with the Delhi office for them to fine tune their strategy," he added.
According to research scholar Ratikant Nayak, one of those who forsook classes to work for the party in Delhi, scores of students at IIT-B became beholden to AAP's ideology during its Mumbai North East Lok Sabha candidate Med ha Patkar's unsuccessful run last year. “The booth inside IIT was the only one from which Patkar won,“ he said. A Facebook group of the party's supporters in the campus exceeds 1,000 members.
Even the AAP people have found IIT-B people work commendable. Preeti Sharma Menon, former Maharashtra state secretary of AAP, who played an important role in the social media campaign for the Delhi elections, said IIT-B volunteers performed a critical role in fashioning the party's response to voter sentiment in Delhi.
“The feedback they provided framed vital turning points in the campaign, “she said. “The importance of social media lies in introducing a new thought or perspective. While everything we spoke about became part of the poll agenda, the BJP, on the other hand, was unable to introduce a single new thought that would get echoed by opinion makers in the press.“
The exit polls predicting an AAP sweep may yet go wrong when the results are announced on Tuesday, but this wouldn't diminish the astonishment at the ability of these IIT-B volunteers to act like a ragtag group of guerrillas effectively battling a well-equipped army.
