West Bengal, Tamil Nadu show limits of political consulting

There are important messages in the political debacles faced by DMK and TMC. All parties now need to reassess what functions they can outsource and at what risk

The resounding defeats of parties advised by political consultants in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu may not spell their end, but their role will now be more circumscribed.

Within Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC), over-reliance on the Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC) is cited as a reason for its loss in West Bengal. In Tamil Nadu, the DMK also hired IPAC for the 2026 Assembly election, which it lost decisively.

Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP) has since cancelled its contract with IPAC after the TMC debacle, officially citing fund-shortages. The contract has been revoked after two negative developments — the spectacular defeat of IPAC’s clients in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, and the ongoing Enforcement Directorate (ED) investigations against its directors. The perception that external consultants can guarantee electoral victories has been severely damaged.

This is not IPAC’s first failure. It earlier stumbled in Goa, Andhra Pradesh (2024), and Delhi (2025), though it had spectacular successes in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu in 2021 and Delhi in 2020.

In West Bengal, IPAC virtually ran the TMC campaign: recommending candidates, curating campaign pitches, managing events, distributing pamphlets, organising rallies, and even mediating factional disputes. Its personnel were embedded in Abhishek Banerjee’s office and the state secretariat. Even Mamata Banerjee was advised on her public behaviour.

Resentment brewed. As early as the 2022 municipal polls, Mamata Banerjee apparently objected to IPAC members attending candidate selection meetings and lobbying for their choices. Rumour has it that Prashant Kishor, then heading IPAC, once texted her that he no longer wished to work with her; she replied, “Thank you.” Yet the partnership resumed, with IPAC functioning almost as Abhishek Banerjee’s private intelligence wing.

An apocryphal story illustrates the resentment: a prominent MP quit after IPAC advised him on what to say in Parliament, and even how deferentially to present himself before Mamata Banerjee.

The lesson to be learnt, however, is that when parties offload their institutional memory and political judgement to an outsourced consultant, they can come to grief. Once the ED effectively shut down the consultancy’s offices in Kolkata, a hollowed-out party found it had no effective organisational backbone left.

In Tamil Nadu, the IPAC was deeply embedded in the DMK’s 2026 campaign. It designed the campaign entirely around the persona of party leader M K Stalin, advising on youth outreach, conducting surveys and designing and implementing the party’s social media strategy. Reports suggest that the name ‘Udanpirape Va (Come, Blood Brother)’ for the DMK’s general councils meeting was based on IPAC’s suggestion.

There are important messages in the political debacles faced by these parties. All parties now need to reassess what functions they can outsource and at what risk.

Indian political parties used to be self-contained institutions till the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) used data analysts, political consultants, and image managers for its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi in the 2014 general elections. Earlier, parties formulated their own election strategies, evaluated potential candidates, and supervised ticket distribution based on internally generated intelligence. By the 2010s, political consultants mushroomed — from the notorious Cambridge Analytica and IPAC to Mindshare Analytics, and Inclusive Minds, which apparently advises the Congress.

Normally business firms outsource only peripheral functions and retain core competencies and skills within the firm. However, Indian political parties did exactly the opposite by outsourcing core functions, weakening their already fragile internal decision-making processes. As political intelligence, campaigns, and even candidate selection were left to outsourced consultants; the party weakened as an institution.

Political consultants sold their expertise as something transferable across geographies and socio-economic landscapes. However, their frequent failure in securing wins suggests that politics remains stubbornly local. Kishor’s own trajectory from a successful election consultant to a failed politician is a case in point.

From advising Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in January 2016 to becoming Janata Dal (United)’s National Vice President in September 2018, Kumar was ousted in January 2020 for excessive interference in party matters. He tried to replicate this strategy with the Congress in 2022, but did not get far.

In October 2024, he launched the Jan Suraaj Party, and in November 2025, contested 238 out of 243 seats in the Bihar Assembly polls. Kishor did everything that IPAC preached to others — mass contact programmes, data analysis, ground surveys, and building a digital campaign infrastructure. He raised all the ‘right’ issues: jobs, migration, education, and corruption. Yet he was defeated comprehensively by local caste and social coalitions and outpaced by Kumar’s welfare measures. Dozens of his candidates polled less than the NOTA votes in their constituencies. The yawning gap between designing politics and practicing became starkly apparent.

Political parties should have realised that they cannot be conceived only as election machines. They must be effective mechanisms of mediating between citizens and political power. This happens by promoting strong internal deliberative processes — through the ground-level contact their cadre maintain with the voters and society at large and the processes through which their knowledge is filtered upwards through the party structure to the leadership. This internal life of the party forms the core of its existence and gives it democratic legitimacy. It cannot be subcontracted to apolitical consultants. Voters will soon realise that they are not choosing between political parties, their programmes, and ideology, but between different consultancy products, and feel cheated.

Does this mean that the days of political consultancy are over? The model of a consultant being embedded in a party and replacing the original party and its capacity to make political judgement will probably whiter away after the West Bengal and Tamil Nadu debacles.

However, given the increasing complexity of Indian elections, parties may have to develop internal data analytics capability — keeping both data analysis and political judgement in-house. Simultaneously, parties would need to consciously increase the democratic space within their organisation — tolerate dissent, give more space to middle-level leaders who might challenge the top leadership, listen to their cadre and accept that the party is a living organism and not merely a machine to be oiled and cranked up during elections to sustain the permanent leadership of certain individuals.

Bharat Bhushan is a Delhi-based journalist.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.