Poll campaigns: The new king-makers

POLL CAMPAIGNS

Mamata Banerjee has retained her association with Prashant Kishor’s Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC). Kishor has been feted as the mastermind behind Mamata’s thumping success in the Bengal elections.

Marketing-branding-analytics experts are crucial new entrants in Indian politics. From restructuring party organisations to playing a role in the distribution of tickets, political strategists and their outfits hold enormous sway over parties. So much so that after the victory in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, Kishor is now one of the prominent faces putting together an alliance against the NDA, working alongside veterans like Sharad Pawar. Though the beneficiaries in Kishor’s campaigns differ starkly, the contours of his work remain moneyed, incisive and manipulative. The pumping of enormous amounts of money into political campaigns allows a formidable space for high-profile political strategists and their teams who, in turn, help sustain the glitz of it all.

The 2014 election campaign of the BJP, curated under Kishor’s non-partisan-sounding ‘Citizens For Accountable Governance’, was among the most expensive political campaigns in Indian history, and one that showed his political prowess. The poll season saw technology creeping into small towns and villages through the “Chai pe Charcha” discussions; 3D holograms of Modi were projected into villages and shanties which craved for stable electricity supply, or a robust internet connection. The glitzy campaign promised the emerald-laced city of Oz, curated by our very own team of branding wizards and the green-glasses they offer. This election campaign marked a shift in the ways in which campaigns were run in the country in recent memory. The public discourse was saturated with claims of ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’, as the ‘Gujarat Model’ was aggressively promoted. A moneyed affair, the campaign revamped the scale on which elections were fought, bolstered by the growing fascination with technology in the country.

Christopher Jaffrelot’s 2015 essay titled ‘The Modi-centric BJP 2014 election campaign: new techniques and old tactics’ analyses the scale of digital technology deployed in the campaign, and writes: “The team he (Modi) started to build then was largely made of US-trained professionals and IT experts, like Prashant Kishor, who formally set up in June 2013 a group called Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG), with its headquarters in Gandhinagar. The 200-400 members of the CAG were more than vote mobilisers, not only because they were paid — like some 800 of their interns — but also because their work was to build a dense network of vote mobilisers at the grassroots level.” The virtual rallies themselves cost around Rs 60 crore, while the total cost of BJP’s 2014 campaign was pegged at Rs 715 crore. The ethos of these activities has continued to mark much of BJP’s activities thereafter: between 2019-2020, the BJP government spent Rs 713.20 crore of the taxpayers’ money on advertisements, and BJP was the largest spender on Facebook ads at over Rs 4.16 crore in a span of 18 months. A report released by the Centre for Media Studies said that the BJP spent around 45% of the total expenditure for 2019 on the Lok Sabha elections, making it one of the most expensive campaigns.

Kishor’s I-PAC consists mostly of young professionals who undertake a variety of tasks like data mining, social media management, research and campaign management. In his workings with the TMC, Kishor’s style remains similar. In August 2020, the TMC was the highest spender on political campaigns in India. Pages run by the I-PAC or the TMC were amongst the highest spenders on ads, sometimes even bypassing the BJP’s ad expenditure in Bengal throughout 2020-21.

The advertising campaign during elections and the tricks in its hats no longer remain hushed. Kishor was seen explaining tactics like christening Mamata Banerjee “Banglar Meye” (Bengal’s Daughter) during the elections: no longer the provider — the “Didi”, Mamata was now the ‘daughter’ of Bengal. By inference, a daughter must be protected against the invading outsiders, the “Bohiragoto”.

While this allowed the Bengal CM to escape accountability, it also resonated with the time-tested, sexist trick of pegging women as helpless daughters of the community who hold its honour. Take for instance, the I-PAC-run website banglargorbomamata.com. The dogged, in-your-face curation of Mamata Banerjee as “Bengal’s pride” is hard to miss. From the very name of the website to the carefully listed photographs of the “BGM (Banglar Gorbo Mamata)” event, Mamata and Bengal’s pride seem inextricable. She is pinned as the unsullied image and the messiah of Bengal’s culture. Though questions about the rising unemployment in the state, failure of the state in conducting TET/WBSSC exams, amount of money spent on clubs, violence seen during the 2018 panchayat polls, etc., affected people’s daily lives, they did not feature in the narrative leading up to the elections. The 2014 image-making of Modi, when read alongside Mamata’s 2021 campaign, presents the model of political functioning where top-down narratives are aggressively, expensively sponsored.

Elections are now also marketing campaigns. This intricate act of curating what must be aggressively pushed forth in print, television and social media has increased political parties’ expenditure on advertisements and election campaigns. The amount of money that goes into the making and sustaining of organisations like I-PAC is enormous, which when funded by political parties leads to the increase in election costs. These marketing wizards ensure that the glitz of political campaigns remains continual and high-pitched, while the details about the funding of parties remains as murky as ever. In these times, parties with deeper pockets will be able to outsource political labour, hire experts, marketers and analysts who hold the ready privilege, pliable expertise and quick-fix strategies of moulding the public discourse, often at the cost of robust engagement between political leaders and voters. As the political decibel level continues to rise with money, the guiding ethos of our politics risks becoming the “survival of the richest”.