Thirty-seven-year old Prasanta Kumar Bisoyi is making his electoral debut in the Odisha Assembly polls this May.

When the Assembly polls were held last time in 2019, Bisoyi, who has been with the Congress since his student days, was not “recommended” and got left out of the ticket race.

This time around, Bisoyi owes his nomination to an idea which has resurfaced in Odisha after 16 long years as the beleaguered Congress is making an attempt at a reversal of electoral fortunes in the state where it has been out of favour with the voters for over two decades.

For the upcoming Lok Sabha and Legislative Assembly polls, the Odisha Congress has partnered with an independent agency and launched a tech-based political strategy, Pragaman (meaning progress) that uses an App and artificial intelligence to make the selection of candidates as transparent as possible along with other poll-objectives, some of which have ramifications beyond election management.

“Last time tickets were distributed on the basis of references and recommendations. Nobody recommended me,” says Bisoyi in- between campaigning for elections to the Bhanjanagar Assembly seat. “This time my work counted. I had to work hard to get the ticket. I got the support of 531 voters as the system was designed.”

Earlier in the week, the Congress’ central election committee released the first list of nominees for the 49 out of the 147 Assembly seats and eight of the 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha, where polls will be held in four phases in May.

Samarendra Mishra, the Bolangir Congress nominee during his campaign Facebook: Samarendra Mishra

Despite murmurs of dissent, the Congress remained firm about the “only Pragaman” policy to first identify the most suitable candidates to contest both the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls.

All aspirants to both the Lok Sabha and the Assembly had to go through a rigorous process. Even the likes of Hema and Shishir Gamang, wife and son of the former chief minister Giridhar Gamang, who were aspirants from the Koraput and Nabarangpur Lok Sabha seats respectively, went through the process but could not qualify. At another time, say, when the Gamangs joined the Congress in mid-January this year, a ticket might have been a pre-condition.

Alongside, the party is also building an "army" that it has lacked in all these years: booth level workers.

Enrollments growing by the day

Following the launch of the app on February 4 by the Congress’ in-charge for Odisha, Ajoy Kumar, the state unit (till 11.18 am March 28) had connected with 1,46,793 voters across the state. Odisha Congress and Pragaman managers – operating from an undisclosed location in Chhattisgarh close to the Odisha border – expect that by mid-April, they will be able to touch two lakh.

“Pragaman is a professional outfit and is not bound to any political ideology. But so far, they have been associated with the Congress,” says a Bhopal-based political analyst.

A website which tracks performances of apps, reveals that from 500 on February 15, about 10 days after Pragaman was launched in Bhubaneswar, the number of downloads has increased to 100,000 by March 15.

Prasanta Bisoyi got his first nomination through the Pragaman app for the Bhanjanagar Assembly seat Sourced by the correspondent

The Congress had received around 2,450 applications for the 147 Assembly seats and 704 for the 21 seats in Lok Sabha under this new method of selection of candidates, from which the final list is being prepared.

"People have been saying the Congress is dead in Odisha. This proves otherwise. Now we have to win over the voters," says Amiya Pandav, chairperson of the Odisha Congress' social media cell.

The Madhya Pradesh connect

The pilot project was carried out in Gwalior: once for the local body polls in 2022 and then for the Assembly polls in the Gwalior (South) constituency last December.

The pilot did not succeed as the Congress nominee Praveen Pathak lost the seat by 2,563 votes.

For the Gwalior (South) seat, the Congress calculation was 73,500 votes would see its candidate through. The local poll managers fixed the target at 80,000 votes. Had that happened Congress would have won the seat --- famous because the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee was born in the Kamal Singh ka Bagh locality and the only temple dedicated to Nathuram Godse stands at the Daulatgunj neighbourhood --- for only the third time since independence.

On December 4, 2023 the day of counting of votes for the Madhya Pradesh Assembly, revealed Pathak had polled 79,781 votes. Despite the loss, Rahul Gandhi was convinced about its efficacy.

The Odisha Congress president Sarat Patnaik, contesting from Nuapada Assembly seat, with party supporters X: @SaratPatINC

On January 31, Pathak was appointed chairman of the project and headed to Bhubaneswar. The party’s official communique that green-lit the project for Odisha, described it in absolutely simplistic terms as a new system for transparent ticket distribution.

The “new system” discards the prevalent practice of the state units submitting multiple names for each constituency from which the Congress’ central election committee in Delhi made the final pick. The nine sitting MLAs were told they too would have to come through the process if they wanted to seek re-election.

The platform was open for anyone and everyone who was ready to contest the polls from Odisha on a Congress ticket. All aspirants had to register with basic personal information and download the Pragaman app. The applications and documents were verified with the use of AI.

“Pragaman is not just about election management. There are 15 stages involved of which the first six will be covered during the elections. The app is the medium of carrying forward the project,” says Bhopal-based Pragaman analyst, Naveen Shukla. “The objective of the project is to create leaders and it is being started in Odisha.”

Strength on the ground = ticket

The main criteria for any aspirant is to prove their strength on the ground which is duly recorded and analysed by team that not only collates the information on the voters connected via the app and maintains daily contacts with those involved, but also provides inputs for the campaign.

The idea is to create a circle of influence where each aspirant has to enrol a select number of followers, who then reach out to their families, friends, acquaintances, co-workers.

“The app is strictly by invite. Each aspirant had to first prove exactly how many people support his candidature. They were assigned specific tasks, some from the app and others like setting up a fixed number of hoardings, instructions to create WhatsApp groups with 500 members each came from the Pradesh Congress, with the objective to assess their actual strength on the ground. While doing so, we are also creating booth-level workers,” said a Congress leader in Bhubaneswar.

Shishir Gamang, the son of former chief minister Giridhar Gamang had applied for the Nabarangpur Lok Sabha seat, but lost to Bhujabal Majhi. Facebook: Shishir Gamang

According to Congress leaders in Odisha, the entire poll machinery will be managed via the app, including release of funds for the campaign. The app, loaded with data from the candidates down to the booth-level worker, maps virtually every voter, giving a fair idea of the voting pattern across demographics.

Two workers per booth are being trained to micro-manage respective campaigns.

Sudarshan Das, known as the “river-man” of the state and an aspirant for the Jaleswar Assembly seat, has participated in the Pragaman project but has apprehensions.

“I don’t see how the followers of those who do not get the ticket will agree to work for the selected nominee. The Congress in Odisha has been riddled with factionalism for years. If there is a way to override this, we haven’t been told about it yet,” says Das, who is unsure whether he will get the ticket.

Many of the aspirants who did not qualify are sulking at having lost out.

Samarendra Mishra, son of the veteran Odisha Congressman Narasingha Mishra and had earlier contested unsuccessfully for the Lok Sabha in 2019, has qualified to contest from the Bolangir Assembly seat. But he admits there could be issues.

“Whatever be the ticket distribution system, Pragaman or the traditional method, some people will always be unhappy with the outcome. We have to find out how we can bring them all together and put up a good fight.”

Pragaman managers insist that the project had already kept this possibility in mind and teams have been sent to the constituencies for integrating the different support groups that were created during the second stage of the qualification process.

On a slippery slope

Over the last two decades, the Congress story in Odisha has unravelled in a fashion familiar to the rest of India.

A devastating cyclone that hit the state in 1999 had among its casualties the then chief minister and one of the tallest tribal leaders from the state, Giridhar Gamang, as well as the state Congress.

The Naveen Patnaik led-BJD literally stormed into power in the backlash following the cyclone holding the hands of the BJP in 2000 and has since grown from strength to strength. On March 5, Patnaik completed 24 years in office.

The Congress on the other hand has shrunk on all fronts. In 2019, when the last elections were held, the Congress managed only nine Assembly seats and the lone Lok Sabha seat from Koraput, with just about 16.3 per cent of the total vote share, relegating it to a distant third in most of the seats.

Many believe in the last five years, the Congress vote share has dipped further and could be anywhere between 6 per cent to eight per cent.

Internally, the Congress had two prime reasons to blame for the damaging defeat: lack of organisation and faulty distribution of tickets. Armed with project Pragaman, the Odisha Congress expects to tackle both.

Ahead of the elections the Odisha Congress leadership has been trying to overcome the problems of internal dissension and a number of disgruntled leaders have returned to the fold. Apart from the Gamang family, former Bargarh MP Sanjay Bhoi, former Koraput MP Jayaram Pangi, dissident MLA Mohammad Moquim, former state unit working president Chiranjib Biswal and former MLA Krushan Chandra Sagaria have all rejoined the Congress.

There have been rumblings within the grand old party, which has resisted revamp attempts for decades.

“This is definitely a churning. We are trying a new thing and it is a struggle because the status quo is being disrupted. But we believe that the Congress is in a fighting position in about 70 seats. If we can stretch this to another 10-15 seats, then we are in for something,” said Dr Ajoy Kumar, AICC official in-charge of Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. “All I can say is that those who can fight on the ground are in a position to win and many unknown faces are going to win this time.”

The degree of success in Odisha will determine whether the Congress will go ahead with the project for a pan India revival, while it faces its toughest poll contest ever this summer.

Pathak, the chairman of the Pragaman project says, unlike previous elections, performance and not perception was the criteria for the selection of candidates in Odisha this time. While he would not get into any poll predictions, Pathak believes Pragaman has arrived.

“If the Congress has to be revived, if democracy has to survive, Pragaman is the only way forward. There is no other alternative to it,” says Pathak.