When it comes to hi-tech strategies, nobody can beat Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister and Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu, for he knows how to manipulate figures using computers and advanced electronic gadgets. And now, his son Lokesh Naidu seems to have inherited the same quality from his father.
This has once again been proved during the ongoing voting for the prestigious CNN-IBN Indian of the Year award.
The channel has this year introduced a first-of-its-kind voting mechanism via Facebook hashtags, wherein people can vote for their favourite nominee, across all categories. The voting has been going on for over a month now. Initially, Kerala IPS officer P Vijayan was leading the table with 21 per cent votes, followed by Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao with 16 per cent votes.
When an English daily newspaper highlighted the news that KCR is in second position, the social media wing of the Telangana Chief Minister got alerted and it started mobilizing the votes of his fans in a big way.
Within no time, KCR crawled to the first position with 31 per cent votes. The manipulation went on for quite some time, resulting in huge gap between KCR and Vijayan. And KCR fan club became overconfident and went on to claim that KCR is the Indian of the Year.
Somehow, it was not liked by Chandrababu Naidu team. It immediately alerted its TDP knowledge centre at NTR Trust Bhavan, now being overseen by Lokesh. He instructed the party workers to vote for Vijayan continuously through Facebook and within a single day, the voting percentage of Vijayan went up sharply, overtaking that of KCR.
So, we had KCR leading in the first position up till last week, but this week witnessed a turn of events as the votes for Vijayan go up in huge numbers giving the IPS officer a 47% majority of votes, at present. And KCR is nowhere near the top rank!
