V Balakrishnan, former Infosys chief financial officer (CFO), has come to the rescue of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) once again to raise funds to contest in the Delhi Assembly elections.

The former CFO this time around has come up with an idea – a ‘Selfie with Mufflerman’ campaign to be run for three-weeks (from December 19 to January 7) in Karnataka to raise funds for the party.

AAP-Karnataka has always been innovative in seeking funding from prospective donors. The fundraising dinner with Arvind Kejriwal is Balakrishnan’s brainchild. The fundraiser in March this year was hugely successful. In a similar vein, AAP-Maharashtra conducted a dinner event last month and raised about ₹91 lakh.

Click to contribute For the ‘Selfie with Mufflerman’ campaign, contributors are selected through a lottery, wherein 25 people will be given a chance to pose and click a selfie with Arvind Kejriwal on January 11 in Bengaluru.

“With this campaign, we at AAP are targeting to raise between ₹50 lakh to ₹1.5 crore,” Balakrishnan told BusinessLine . Talking about the idea, Balakrishnan said, Mufflerman was trending on Twitter for 19 days at a stretch during the heydays of AAP movement. “In many ways, this reflects the ideology of the party itself. It was an organic idea initiated by a volunteer and the concept turned viral overnight, like a completely crowdsourced initiative.”

Spartan initiative “Not a single penny was spent on the campaign. And yet, the Mufflerman who mercilessly fought corruption became one of the most-talked about online phenomena in the political history of the country,” he added.

While major political parties get close to 75 per cent of their funding from undisclosed sources. AAP is the only party that has been putting up all its donations on the website in a transparent manner.

“The party is targeting mainly the general public to raise funds and we plan to use social media extensively,” Balakrishnan said.

“AAP has showed for the first-time that elections in the country can be fought without money or muscle power. The people in India are eager to fund honest politics and AAP is the only party that provides this platform. AAP believes in the idea of crowdsourced funding for fighting elections,” he explained.

Amongst different states, the people of Karnataka helped AAP raise the maximum amount of funds during the last Lok Sabha elections, and stood third in the funds collected for the last Delhi assembly elections. “Karnataka topped the list after Mumbai with regard to raising funds to fight both the Lok Sabha and Delhi assembly elections. Similarly, the AAP is working on raising funds in the state for the forthcoming elections in Delhi,” said Ravi Krishna Reddy, convener of AAP-Karnataka.

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