A team from IIT-B shaped AAP's Delhi poll campaign

Behind the Aam Aadmi Party's stunning 2015 Delhi campaign was an unlikely war room: ten volunteers at IIT-Bombay who built a research tool to mine tens of thousands of social media posts for voter sentiment.

The students created the program in November 2014 specifically to measure public opinion. Their algorithm ran word analysis over a database of thousands of Twitter handles, categorizing reactions to events and issues as negative, weakly negative, neutral, weakly positive, or positive. Three or four volunteers manually reviewed the scans, and the results went to AAP's Delhi office to fine-tune strategy.

"The program runs a word analysis on a database of many thousands of twitter handles and categorises people's responses," explained Divyank Agarwal, a fourth-year Engineering Physics student on the team. The analysis steered AAP away from issues voters read as "negative" and toward concerns like women's safety, which the data showed resonated strongly in the capital. It also tracked swings in sentiment toward AAP in near real time.

Agarwal and three other students went further — skipping classes, and in his case an exam, to campaign door-to-door in Delhi's jhuggis for over a week. "I haven't told my parents that I bunked classes," he admitted. Research scholar Ratikant Nayak, another volunteer, said AAP's ideology had caught on at the campus during Medha Patkar's Lok Sabha run from Mumbai North East the previous year — "the booth inside IIT was the only one from which Patkar won."

Senior AAP leader Manish Sisodia said social-media analysis shaped how the party allocated its manifesto promises: "The majority of inputs on education and regarding free WiFi came through social media. Sentiment analysis of social media particularly helped us understand the specific demands of women." Preeti Sharma Menon, who ran AAP's social-media campaign for the Delhi elections, said the IIT-B volunteers' feedback "framed vital turning points in the campaign."

The result is history: on February 7, 2015, AAP won 67 of Delhi's 70 assembly seats — one of the most lopsided victories in Indian electoral history, with a little help from ten students and an algorithm.

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Based on reporting by Mumbai Mirror/Times of India, February 2015.