The BJP’s toll free number to show support for the Citizenship Amendment Act appears to have been unlucky from the start.
It began with the party being trolled on social media after people noticed that the toll free number was being circulated through a variety of messages that had nothing to do with the CAA. The theme of the promotional messages ranged from Netflix subscriptions, invitations from ‘lonely girls’, dating, support for Virat Kohli, sex chats, piles treatment and even hair transplant services.
The misleading messages went so viral that Union Home Minister Amit Shah had to issue a statement saying that the toll free number released by BJP was for the CAA and had nothing to do with “a channel called Netflix”. He didn’t clarify on the other promotional messages though.
Despite the commotion, Shah said that the campaign was a success. On Monday, 6 January, he said, “52,72,000 missed calls have been received on a special number in support of the Citizenship Amendment Act from verifiable phone numbers. Total 68 lakh calls have been received”.
It is not known what proportion of the 52 lakh missed calls were out of support for the CAA and how many were driven by the callers’ extra-curricular desires.
This is a mystery that may never be revealed.
This leaves us with the slightly more mundane task of discussing what the 52 lakh missed calls mean politically.
Is 52 Lakh Missed Calls A Big Deal?
Let’s assume that a majority of these 52 lakh missed calls were purely out of support for the CAA.
Even then, it would be less impressive than the ‘success’ of BJP’s membership drives.
For instance, in the BJP’s membership drive in July-August 2019, it claims to have enrolled 4 crore members, a majority of them through the missed call campaign.
Soon after the membership drive, BJP working president Jagat Prakash Nadda said that the party has 18 crore members.
Now the question is, if the BJP actually has 18 crore members, how did it get just 52 lakh calls in support of CAA, that is only 2.9 percent of the total members claimed? This could be due to three reasons.
- A majority of BJP members are opposed to or unenthusiastic about the CAA, therefore they didn’t care to give a missed call.
- The BJP failed to publicise the CAA campaign the way it handled its membership drives.
- The claim of 18 crore members itself isn’t accurate
All three aren’t good signs for the BJP.
Is it A Data Gathering Exercise?
There’s another line of argument which is far more optimistic from the BJP’s point of view. It is that the missed call campaign isn’t about getting the people’s viewpoint on the CAA at all. It is nothing but a data-gathering exercise by the BJP.
Put simply, critics say that this can be used to collect a database of mobile numbers that can be used in future to push BJP’s agenda to voters, in the form of WhatsApp forwards, mass messages etc.
The BJP has flatly denied this.
Union Minister DV Sadananda Gowda gave “100 percent assurance that the data will not be misused”.
But in the past, the BJP has reportedly used missed call data to push the party’s content.
According to a story in Firstpost, in 2015:
“The technology the party adopted to implement its missed call membership drives also gives the BJP a huge data bank that it can use for Narendra Modi’s future outreach programme. It will help the BJP even reach out to states where its organisational strength is limited. BJP leaders say that this will also allow Modi to establish a two-way “Samvad” with people, especially when it comes to making his point.”
Then Newslaundry quotes JPS Rathore a BJP functionary from Uttar Pradesh, saying that the party collected contact numbers of 1.3 crore people through its missed call campaign and these people became the consumers for its online and telephonic propaganda.
So if these reports is true, it doesn’t matter if the BJP toll free number is getting missed calls out of support for CAA or through dating invites and hair transplant ads. The purpose of gathering data would be achieved either way.
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