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AAP’s ex-social media head Ankit Lal to help Congress in Uttarakhand polls
Ankit Lal took a break from Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP after the 2020 Delhi assembly elections to start his own venture in political consultancy.
NEW DELHI: Ankit Lal, Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) former social media head, has been hired by the Congress to be a part of its campaign strategy team for the Uttarakhand Assembly elections scheduled early next year, people familiar with the matter said.
Lal handled social media for the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP for eight years between 2012 and 2020 and was credited with running the party’s successful social media campaigns for the 2013, 2015 and 2020 assembly elections in Delhi.
The engineer-turned social media manager dropped out of his role in Kejriwal’s party after the 2020 assembly elections to start his own venture in political consultancy.
“I don’t want to comment on that until unless it comes through the party’s media department,” Lal said, declining to comment on his new role in the Congress for the Uttarakhand elections where the Aam Aadmi Party will also be competing for seats in the 70-member assembly.
Senior Congress members, however, confirmed that he is being taken on board.
Rohan Gupta, head of Congress’s social media department, said: “Lal, in all likelihood, is being hired as part of the team for overall political campaign strategy, not just social media”.
Gupta underlined that the Congress’s social media campaign is being handled by people from within the party.
“Our social media reach has already surpassed that of the BJP and AAP in Uttarakhand. Recently, we launched the Uttarakhand ki awaaz (Uttarakhand’s voice) campaign to crowdsource ideas for the party’s election manifesto. We are also creating WhatsApp groups for all the proposed candidates and reaching out to people in each constituency through these groups,” he said.
Over the past few months, Lal has been associated with the political strategy for Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) in the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh election. Prior to that, he also was part of the campaign strategy team for the Janata Dal (United) for the Bihar elections in November last year, a person aware of the matter said.
