The BJP flag.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: With an aim to change its digital presence across various state units, BJP’s Madhya Pradesh unit has appointed its first ‘WhatsApp Pramukh’. The party named Ramkumar Chaurasia as the in-charge of the Bhopal booth committee.
The state unit, known to be the best for its digital presence, aims to have one such in-charge each across all of the state’s 65,000-odd booths.
The ‘WhatsApp Pramukh’, the first of its kind, will be part of the party’s famed booth-committee, which has recently been restructured.
State BJP President VD Sharma inaugurated the booth structure, becoming the Panna Pramukh in one of them.
The state unit’s IT Cell now aims to have one WhatsApp Pramukh in each of the state’s 65,015 booths by the end of the month. The state’s newly restructured booth committees, in its 12-member capacity, will also have a Mann Ki Baat Pramukh, a Booth Level Agent, a Labhbharti Pramukh, as well as Mahila Pramukh.
A senior party leader, who did not wish to be named, said that the job of the WhatsApp Pramukh had existed in a certain form earlier. “They will be tasked with forming WhatsApp groups, and putting out messages of what our government has done in them. Their main task is to connect the voter to the BJP’s ideology,” the leader said.
The Madhya Pradesh unit of the party, which has its own localised version of the party’s Saral app called the Sangathan app, has digitised the records of over 38 lakh people, which included records of all the members of the state unit’s booth committees as well as some key voters. In all, among the party’s 65,015 booths, the BJP has a booth committee in over 60,000 booths.
On the Sangathan app, the party maintains the details of its booth committee members, as well as its party members, which are verified digitally. The revamped booth committee structure is a precursor to the statewide elections, including that of mandal and district committees, which are due next month.
The party had, in the past, deployed over 40 lakh booth level workers to win the last assembly elections in December. Digitally, to fight mounting anti-incumbency, the Madhya Pradesh state unit had formed more than 42,000 WhatsApp groups to reach out to voters. Apart from that, over 95 lakh missed calls were generated by the digital team to reach out to voters.