Driving AAP campaign, cooks, IIT grads, multinational executives

Whiteboards have detailed campaign strategies and schedules. Volunteers pore over their laptops, some make calls, others crunching numbers. Gandharva Joshi of Kausani (Uttarakhand) left a handsome salary in an MNC in Atlanta to volunteer for AAP in 2014. In 2013 in Delhi, he handled the NRI fundraising and calling campaign from abroad. In 2014 when Arvind Kejriwal took on Narendra Modi from Varanasi, he joined the campaign there. Now, he single-handedly leads the calling campaign for Punjab, where tens of thousands of volunteers across the globe make calls on a toll-free number and are connected to the electorate in Punjab. The volunteer quizzes the voter in a certain format and makes a pitch for AAP. Joshi keeps and updates a record of the lakhs of calls.

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Ambling across the floors is Raghu Mahajan, who topped the IIT and AIEEE entrances in 2006. After two years at IIT Delhi, he dropped out to join MIT for a bachelors in Physics, finished his masters in Cambridge, moved on to Stanford for PhD. On a six-month sabbatical, Mahajan has developed three apps – Chalo Punjab for volunteer registration, one for door-to-door campaign and the third on campaign management that did not quite take off. Mahajan, a local of Chandigarh, is now monitoring booth management. Over 27,000 volunteers report to him from 5,000 booths in Manjha region. “After February 4, I will be off to the hills for a break. Then in the first week of March there is a research conference in Princeton University. And then I have to go back to defend my thesis and from September I will be on my post-doctoral fellowship. But on March 11, I have to be here to see what all this comes to,” says Mahajan.

On the first floor, ENT surgeon Sarika Verma and entrepreneur Richa Pandey Mishra labour over lists of volunteers and star campaigners respectively. Sarika kicked a head of the department position at a city hospital in September to join the campaign. Her clinic in Gurgaon had served as party office for Yogendra Yadav when he had contested the parliamentary polls. Sarika’s daughter and son, 10 and 7, wait for the elections to get over but in the meantime her son has learnt the symbols of all parties. “Only for the campaign, we have over 27,000 volunteers, of these roughly 4,000 have come mainly from Rajasthan, UP, MP, Haryana and Delhi. My job is to ensure they are spread out across constituencies and move out of Punjab 48 hours before polling,” she says.

Mishra, also AAP national spokesperson, has shut down her skill building start-up in collaboration with IIT Madras. For Punjab she has been micro-managing star schedules. Several volunteers confess their families do not even know they are here. “My parents think I am in Dubai at work,” said one, who quit his job in the US. Meals of lentils, rice, rotis and a vegetable are served to over 250 volunteers twice a day. “This is the best I could do by ensuring no one works on an empty stomach,” says Pushpendra Singh, a fruit and vegetable trader who funds the meals, as auto driver Eashwar carries out huge vessels of food that he will ferry to the party’s other office in Sector 35.