The Lok Sabha poll debacle may still rankle the Gujarat BJP leaders, but in true never-say-die spirit, its much-hyped IT Cell is already looking at future for better cyber war tactics. In the coming days, it plans to pick up from where it had left this election.

The Gujarat BJP website had 57,000 hits between February and May 16, which is not bad considering that just 7 per cent of the Indian population have access to Internet, said BJP IT Cell convener Dr Shashiranjan Yadav, even as he sought to delink election results from the hits the website received. “IT Cell works continuously. It has nothing to do with electioneering or converting hits into votes,” he said.

The hits were counted to gauge popularity of the website during election times, Yadav said, adding that during normal periods it would receive 250-300 hits. To avoid dangers of saturation, the website will be loaded with new features like video/photo sharing, blogging and news posts, he said.

But most importantly, the Cell will soon gear up for meeting the challenge of collecting data of its two million members (of whom 75,000 are active members) for use during the next Sangathan Parva, a triennial event coinciding with the organisational elections due in the third quarter.

Once completed, it will be easier to have a two-way communication with members whose cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses will be of immense use, Yadav said, adding that courier service had become a thing of the past.

“In the next 10 years, we will be able to have web based campaigning like other countries in the West when we will graduate from TV based campaigning,” he said while admitting that it was hard to achieve greater reach to netizens whose interest in political things was lacklustre.

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