The Hindu : Pick up the phone, it may be PM

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 26, 2004

National

National

Pick up the phone, it may be PM

By Neena Vyas

NEW DELHI, FEB. 25. Pick up your telephone when it rings the next time and you may hear the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, delivering his one-minute election campaign message. Open your e-mail account and you may be flooded with messages from the Bharatiya Janata Party. And when your mobile telephone goes "ting,'' you may find an SMS message from the party.

And for the more enthusiastic would-be voter of the BJP there is more - download a new tune for the mobile telephone - Vande Mataram or the BJP anthem - or go to the new website, Mission 2004, to get all the data and documents related to party activity.

A power-point presentation on the Bharatiya Janata Party's plans for a nationwide "e-campaign'' ahead of Lok Sabha polls was made today by the party general secretary in-charge of the campaign, Pramod Mahajan.

The television, radio, mobile telephones, the Internet and all the modern gadgets for speedy communication will be used by the party beginning in a few days to reach some estimated 12 to 15 crore people right in their homes, Mr. Mahajan said.

Mr. Mahajan would not reveal how big the BJP's budget was for this new electoral war through the electronic waves, but every possible voter had been thought about. The younger generation of voters, Gen Y2K4, as he preferred to describe them, would get their messages on their favourite television channel, MTV, the FM radio or other music channels. Besides, universities and other educational institutes are also to be bombarded with the BJP's electoral prayers.

Will this distract the young people who will be in the midst of the examination season? To this question, Mr. Mahajan replied lightly: "if I had my way, I would put a question in every examination paper - who do you want to make Prime Minister of India?''

Would the unsuspecting would-be BJP voter be made to pay for the SMS or for Internet time when looking at the party website? To this question, Mr. Mahajan's answer was "yes'', but for the telephone message from Mr. Vajpayee, the BJP would pay, as it would call the voters. The party was trying to work on getting discounts from the telephone corporations for mass calls, he said.

And not to leave unexplored other avenues, the BJP was trying to get some advertisement space on channel 10 sports to coincide with the India-Pakistan cricket matches, Mr. Mahajan disclosed. And if all this was not enough, the party was also planning to distribute and put on sale t-shirts, caps, and other small apparel with the party's lotus symbol or even a smiling Vajpayee picture.

Would this work? To this question, Mr. Mahajan's response was that the airwaves campaign did seem to work in Rajasthan during the Assembly elections a few months ago.

As for invading the privacy of people, Mr. Mahajan shrugged the problem away. All kinds of mails are received by people through post, he pointed out. Electronic mail was no different.

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