2 August 2024

How a Secret BJP War Room Mobilized Female Voters to Win the Indian Elections

Nilesh Christopher & Varsha Bansal

In April, an unassuming old building in New Delhi’s furniture market housed roughly 30 youngsters. Some were hunched over their laptops crunching data on Excel or analyzing a heat map, while others huddled to discuss strategy. These were engineering graduates, economists, political scientists, and others. There were office chairs, desks, and a couple of white boards.

The entire setup could easily have passed as a startup office, but it wasn’t. This was an election war room.

From there, Sapiens Research founder Rimjhim Gour’s team served as the brains of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. The party’s senior leadership had entrusted Gour with mobilizing 12.5 million female voters across India, and her team spent their days crunching historical polling trends, using data to pinpoint critical constituencies, browsing WhatsApp for real-time on-ground updates, and shaping electoral strategies to usher in BJP for a third consecutive term.



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