Volunteers of AAP: Meet Aarti Chadha

Aarti Chadha was neither part of India Against Corruption movement, nor knew much about Indian politics. Back in 2012, she joined twitter to follow some of the bollywood superstars. Aarti remembered watching the launch of Aam Aadmi Party on TV but never imagined that she will be a part of it and someday will lead the social media team. Through twitter she came in contact with AAP volunteers who were preparing a  social media campaign for Arvind Kejriwal’s Bijli-Paani Satyagrah. She volunteered and started to develop her skills in social media campaigning and started her own hashtags. Slowly she gained momentum on twitter and presently have more than 127,000 followers. Everyday presents a new beginning and experience for her. 

Selfless Volunteering: Aarti is one of the many selfless volunteers who find a driving force within themselves and have volunteered for AAP for years. She volunteers as a mentor of AAP twitter team and can be followed at @aartic02 on twitter. Her day starts with finding and selecting useful news articles about AAP governance to be shared throughout the day and ends with keeping people informed about AAP developments. There is no instructor who gives orders about what to share and what not to. It is all decided by volunteers themselves following the concept of “Swaraj”. 

with Raghav Chadha of Aam Aadmi Party 

Arguments and Fake News: Counter arguing other party members and handling fake news are the most challenging activities for social media volunteers. Political vendetta of the opposition parties against AAP MLAs create a virtual war on social media platforms. This keeps the volunteers busy as they receive lots of engagements from users on twitter, facebook etc. Whenever there is a case against (real or fake) AAP MLAs, media highlights it but when the case is dismissed, there is hardly any coverage. In the process, reputation of AAP suffers a lot of damage. It is only social media which provides users factual news of any developments directly from AAP party members. 

The Challenge: Volunteership is great in a way that every volunteer is self driven and motivated. But it is challenging at the same time as the influx and outflux of volunteers is a continuous process. They join and move-on with their life at will. Because of this redundancy in involvement, managing knowledge transfer and training schedules is very challenging. Sometimes a volunteer has to leave the team just after getting trained. So it is a continuous battle. Without a salaried staff who work a 9 - 5 job, everything including posters, banners and infographics is volunteer driven without any professional help. 

Politics and Expectations: Health and education models of Delhi are talked about worldwide. It is not a one person job but a product of numerous collaborative efforts. After looking at the health and education reforms in Delhi, every concerned Indian citizen expects the model to be scaled to a national level with every state following it. Unfortunately, politics of caste and religion is more interesting to majority of Indian political parties. On many occasions, government of the union territory of NCT Delhi has been stopped from executing important public welfare works. It can be said that even when the execution rate of AAP Delhi govt is half the ideal situation of zero interruptions from opposition, their reforms are known across the world. With all these political interferences and pressures, AAP govt has proven the concept of honesty in intentions. Every promise made by AAP is being fulfilled. Status of their initially promised 70 tasks in the manifesto can be checked on the recently launched tracker website “aaptracker.in”. 

with other AAP volunteers 

Election Campaigns: With the help of a team working on-field, social media team design election campaigns and shape the strategies to reach out to social media users. Both the national and state units work together as a team. With the current Delhi govt trying to do their best in accomplishing the items on their agenda, cross referencing of manifestos across different states is being considered a new strategy. This will help AAP in propagating Delhi govt works to people living in other states who are not very well connected with the internet. This will also give a feel to voters that the promises are not always ideal and are actually doable as Delhi government has already implemented (or implementing) them. 

Volunteers Vs Marketing Firms: Volunteers like Aarti have acclaimed everything from scratch and learning by themselves. There exist marketing and social media influencing firms whose job is to build the personality of any individual who is willing to pay a good sum of money. Without any professional training and background, these volunteers are a real challenge to those established firms. Volunteer driven trends like #MufflerMan which was a top trending hashtag for more than a week have created history on Indian social media. 

With the support of her family and other AAP volunteers, Aarti is self driven and has to often sacrifice her family, office and social engagement time. But she considers it worth the effort in order to bring about a change in the political fabric of the nation.

Read more stories of AAP Volunteers.

AAP USA chapter organizes a weekly conference call every Sunday at noon 12:00PM EST. More details about the call and the guest can be found at @aapchat (https://twitter.com/aapchat).