LS polls: Parties gear up with big data, courses on digital campaigns

CHENNAI: With less than 18 months left for the national and regional parties to gear up for the May 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the political strategists and parties IT wings have intensified the preliminary works.

Special courses and workshops on politics, digital marketing campaigns and political memes are some of the topics that being taught to aspirants in politics. The political pundits and poll strategists in Chennai are also working on the election syllabus for each party and individual.

Joining the likes of poll strategists Prashanth Kishore and Sunil Konugolu, the political strategists in TN are also building up their networks and have started monitoring public comments on political developments to collect intelligence.

These data will be crucial for the political biggies ahead of polls, admit multiple party sources dealing with IT wings.

The nuances of BJP leader Amit Shah, political dynamics of DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi, the political charisma behind MGR and the rise of Jayalalithaa from a tinsel town heroine to all-powerful AIADMK leader, are some of the topics that are to be part of a political curriculum developed by Aspire, a private company that is offering crash courses and workshop on political science.

Course director and former AIADMK IT wing secretary Aspire Swaminathan had also formulated a syllabus for youngsters to learn about the application of big data and artificial intelligence in politics. The raw political input like public sentiments and social media comments when processed through computer search engines will help to know the public pulse ahead of polls. We are planning to unveil several courses and software products for political parties, Swaminathan told DT Next.

While the DMK and the BJP high command had already passed instructions to the party functionaries to gear up for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the opposition AIADMK had also instructed its IT wing to intensify the campaign against DMK.

“Party old-timers are also now relying on cell phones to share political content and the role of IT will be bigger during the campaign days,” says Venkatesh, an AIADMK worker in Egmore constituency. Recently former AIADMK MLA K Srinivasan started changing his WhatsApp status profile daily with pictures of MGR and Amma and others are also now following this, he said adding that digital campaign is crucial for the political parties to win the polls.