Congress needs to hone booth management skills in Karnataka

BENGALURU: A postmortem of the Gujarat assembly election results reveals a serious flaw in the Congress strategy: poor booth management. While the BJP’s booth management was robust and proactive, Congress teams lacked enthusiasm and were negligent.

Premchand Palety, CEO of C-Fore, a multidisciplinary research organisation that carries out psephological studies, who studied the Gujarat elections closely, said, “Congress booth management, compared to BJP, has been poor. This partly affects their Karnataka unit also.’’

Asked about this, KPCC former president Dr G Parameshwara said that as KPCC president, he had constituted teams in every booth. “My own constituency has 242 booths, and each booth has a team of about 20 people under the booth committee president, who ensure that the booths on the ground are strengthened. During my time, we had started the process of strengthening booth committees,’’ he said.

Now, wherever there are sitting Congress MLAs, booth management is good, but there are more than 50 booths where the Congress has not won in more than three elections, where booth management needs to be rejuvenated. Senior Congress leaders complain that booth management is a serious issue. “The present state leadership of the Congress needs to wake up to the problem of poor booth management in Karnataka too,’’ informed sources said.

KPCC working president Saleem Ahmed said, “We are in the process of strengthening our booth committees and adding more members across the state.’’Former Congress general secretary in-charge of Gujarat and Opposition leader in the Council B K Hariprasad, who was in Gujarat during the recent elections, said, “There is no comparison between the two states, but yes, Congress has to strengthen booth management in some places in Karnataka.”

By contrast, the BJP’s booth management is very different. “We have Pancharatna teams which means there is one SC, one ST, one OBC, one woman and a general representative. In addition, we have a page pramukh team and booth committee teams. In many booths, we have 40-50 persons per team. Above these teams we have Shakti Kendra teams and over them we have Mahashakti Kendra teams,’’ BJP General Secretary Ravi Kumar said. Clearly, despite the resounding win in Gujarat, the party is leaving nothing to chance in Karnataka.