As the Congress gets ready for the big battle in 2019 to take on the BJP, the process it will follow to select candidates is likely to undergo a major shift.
The party is increasingly adopting a feedback-based system of shortlisting candidates through its internal app Shakti, which allows ordinary workers to have a say on who could be the winning candidate from a particular constituency.
“The feedback on the app will certainly be one of the inputs, but can’t be the only factor in deciding the candidate,” said a Congress functionary familiar with the functioning of the Shakti app.
The Congress seems to be enthused by its experience in the recently concluded elections in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan where the app was used to take feedback on the chief ministerial candidate, get data about voting behaviour of every booth and weak spots for the party in past elections.
“Party leaders were getting live data and feedback from 15,000-odd booths each in M.P. and Rajasthan and around 10,000 in Chhattisgarh every day in the run-up to the Assembly elections,” said the Congress functionary.
1,000 points
But contrary to reports, feedback is not sought from the nearly five million workers who are registered on the app.
“Feedback is sought only from workers who have accumulated 1,000 points against their name,” says the Congress office-bearer.
Verified Congress workers have been given points and are graded according to their engagement with the app. The data generated by the Shakti app is directly monitored by Congress president Rahul Gandhi since he had revamped the erstwhile computer department of the Congress into data analytics wing. And the performance of this app is also being monitored by Mr. Gandhi himself.
Take for example, Karnataka, where the party is in a coalition government. Until the third week of December 2018, there were 12.3 lakh registered users and as many 40,000 workers were registered on a single day. These workers were then mapped against the 54,206 booths in the State. Data then shows how many booths are covered by Shakti workers. Of the total number of booths, 43,542 or 80% booths in Karnataka are covered by Shakti.