BJP to take poll campaign in Gujarat on YouTube, blogs

Ahmedabad, March 7 : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Gujarat, known for leveraging IT tools in election campaigns, is planning to put up key excerpts of past speeches by prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani and Chief Minister Narendra Modi on the internet, including on YouTube and blogs.

The initiative of preparing the framework for the 'streaming video campaign' has been taken up by the BJP's IT cell in Gujarat which has started selecting video clips from a library of footage of public meetings addressed by the two leaders during the past five years.

"The move involves selecting and editing parts of speeches of the two leaders and preparing short video clips which could be streamed on to not just the BJP Gujarat unit website but also blogs, YouTube and Orkut," Shashi Ranjan Yadav, chief of the party's IT cell in Gujarat, told IANS.

"We are also gathering fresh videos and short films from our workers in Gujarat and plan to upload them after editing," he said.

The IT cell uses a special software to prepare the videos, ranging from 15 seconds to 25 seconds in duration.

"We organised a workshop to teach our cadres the art of shooting films on camcorders and mobile phones. Such films could be added to the 'streaming video' programme in the party website well before the candidates file their nominations for Lok Sabha seats," Yadav said.

A number of IT experts addressed the workshop and taught party volunteers how to prepare small video clips.

Yadav, who holds a doctorate in mathematics, had launched several infotech initiatives in the run up to the 2004 Lok Sabha and 2007 assembly polls.

"The video clips will mainly target the Congress," he said. "The BJP IT cell expects to upload all the video footages and short films by the end of next week on various websites."