How Mamata Banerjee's digital war rooms won West Bengal over

West Bengal’s romance and engagement with subaltern politics is both cultural and historical. The Marxists used land reforms as an organising principle for rural governance since the '70s.

Operation Bargadar, a system of recording the names of bargadars or sharecroppers giving them a set of legal protections from eviction from the land they tilled and allowing them a share in the produce, created a system of economic rights for small and marginal farmers. Operation bargadar was a major course topic in all economics classes starting from higher secondary in Bengal.

I have always held that Operation Bargadar was the precursor of MNREGA and UIDAI – large-scale welfare and subsidy programming by the state to create beneficiaries. Agriculture, rural areas contribute to about 20 per cent of the state’s economic activity and account for the largest share of the labour force. Using the time-tested model, the Trinamool Congress too relied on a strategy of converting beneficiaries into core supporters and voting constituents.

So the Rs 2 per kg rice, the Kanyasree programme through grant of bicycles and scholarships to girl students, a good track record of MNREGA implementation - all helped the TMC expand its majority.

From the start its #RealBengal campaign was built on this.

I travelled a fair bit in rural Bengal looking for the "gramer aal" or narrow beaten makeshift village roads and was pleasantly surprised to find good motorable roads. Connectivity - improvement of roads, modern day telecommunications - is an all important tool for both delivery and access to public and private goods and services. And in politics, crucial tool for mobilisation and organisation.

The TMC realised this very early on and used modern internet communication technologies to drive engagement, ground mobilisation and drive a counter-narrative to negative publicity around high-profile incidents like the Kolkata flyover collapse or the political sting expose.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee ran a scorching ground campaign of public rallies and padyatras addressing more than 200 rallies in 40 days. The second most busy person during this campaign period was Abhishek Banerjee, MP and also founder president of the TMC youth wing. While addressing more than 140 rallies, he directed the party’s communication apparatus, crunched data and led digital and communications war-room from Kalighat supported by former quizmaster and MP Derek O Brien.

They raised a sharp core of youth volunteers from national law schools, B-schools who worked as a tight 24x7 rapid response team, quickly analysing daily events, news breaks, rival campaigns, prepared briefing memos and factsheets for Mamata and Abhishek which the leaders used in their direct public contact campaign programmes.

This was a far cry from the 2011 election campaign which was mounted on the back of a large-scale land rights movement using traditional tools of electioneering and coalition building. The mandate this time is bigger and singular for the TMC.

West Bengal has 65 million voters. About 21 million people in the state are connected to the internet. A recent IAMAI study found 8.3 million Facebook users in the 18+ voting age in the state and found 70 constituencies in Bengal were likely to be highly impacted by engagement on social media platforms, particularly on Facebook.

Very early on Mamata understood the value of the internet platforms and digital technology for youth engagement. Having been a community organiser with enormous street fighting capabilities she used these platforms to run a series of synchronised online and offline activities and an extensive campaign for more than 45 days.

Increasingly, all the politicians with strong grassroot mass bases - from Modi to Kejriwal to Mamata, have recognised that digital technologies are an essential facility to reach out to their voters and they use it as a critical rapid response tool. Most have realised the need for voters to connect with their leaders and vice versa and used it for disintermediation.

Therefore, in the middle of the seven-phase election, Mamata Banerjee did a Facebook Q&A to cover more ground and reach out to young constituents. She also did an impromptu Facebook-live ahead of Naboborsho or the Bengali new year, which received huge engagement in views and likes.

The campaign also used known musicians to create a lyrical song and used short video stories which could go viral quickly to showcase its five-year performance report card – humanising each story. Shot like home videos with real beneficiaries these short videos got a lot of engagement on Facebook. The TMC released 38 #RealBengal videos on Facebook.

The campaign followed a topographical theme of sorts. This was reflected and integrated both online and offline. So while she focused on talking about development and benefits in Junglemahal, by the time the campaign moved to Kolkata she was attacking her opponents and focusing more on refuting the opposition parties.

The TMC went into the elections well prepared. Moments after the Election Commission announced the poll schedule they released their candidate list, they had a leader, they pivoted their campaign on rural development through #realbengal stories.

In politics, erosion starts from the day a party gains power. Didi ran a blistering scorch-earth campaign strategy and won decisively – difficult for any incumbent.