BENGALURU: Despite criticism that the Bharatiya Janata Party is becoming extremely centralised – contradictory to its conventional structural approach – the centralisation seems to be spilling onto other wings of the party. Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, under the instruction of the party president Amit Shah, a centralised team for social media has been set up to not just create content and package it state wise, but also constantly monitor social media cells of each state.

“Every rally of the Prime Minister is edited into small clips, dubbed into regional languages, made into packages and sent to state units, all by the central team. Voice over artistes, editors, and scriptwriters are part of the team. The local social media cells’ only job is to upload the material,” said a source from the BJP’s social media cell in Karnataka.

In fact, such is the excessive control of the centralised teams, that it sees to whether the sent material has been uploaded on time, and all the activities on the same is monitored regularly.

While the job of scripting posts related to the current political scenario at the state level still lies with the state units, mechanisms to gauge the number of tweets and posts, in comparison with other states, and regular reports on least-performing and best-performing state units have been put in place by the centralised team. “Earlier, it was considered a good job if a topic or hashtag trended but now questions are raised on why a particular state posted a particular number of tweets when another had tweeted more,” explained an office bearer of the BJP. 

The state units have begun the process of recruiting volunteers for the BJP’s social media cell ahead of the LS polls but the numbers are expected to be very low given that the central leadership of the BJP is keen on sending its own set of volunteers, professionals from New Delhi directly.