Iftikhar Gilani
In the spring of 2014, I found myself in Samastipur, a modest town in Bihar, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of India’s general elections. I learnt that the manager’s cabin of a local cinema hall just opposite my hotel serves as a centre of political discourse, where political workers, intellectuals and distinguished citizens come together in the evening to discuss a range of issues over several cups of tea.
In the provinces, the mention of a journalist representing a Delhi-based newspaper evokes a mixture of awe and respect from political operatives, perhaps due to the perceived access these journalists have to the corridors of power.
This assumption is not entirely unfounded. By covering parliamentary sessions, Delhi-based journalists get closer to influential politicians than their counterparts in the provinces.
So, when I joined them as an uninvited guest, they received me with respect and admiration. The political discourse in Samastipur was lively. Over tea, discussions centred on the impact of a possible Narendra Modi victory. One local activist argued that a Modi victory would not only redefine Indian elections but would also set a global precedent.
The battle, he explained, was not between ideologies or political formations, but between traditional campaign methods and modern technology. He said that this election pits human emotion against technological manipulation.
Modi’s 2014 election campaign pioneered the use of social media to influence the electorate, using a mix of half-truths and strategic misinformation. This local political activist from Samastipur proved that there is no parallel to Biharis to perfectly diagnose the political pulse.
The inventor of this new electoral strategy was Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Modi’s mentor Keshavbhai Patel, who used small camcorders and a local cable TV network to win the provincial elections in Gujarat in 1995.
High customs duties were levied on these camcorders in those days. Patel, who was chief minister of Gujarat before Modi, found a way by inviting a large number of Gujaratis living in the UK and each of them brought a camcorder.
At election rallies, many non-Indian Gujaratis could be seen holding camcorders and broadcasting the rallies on the local cable network, bringing the campaign directly into the living rooms of the electorate. This tactic brought so much colour to the election campaign that the Congress campaign looked dull and pale. Since then, the BJP has been in power in the state uninterruptedly.
Prashant Kishore’s entry
However, the real architect of the modern use of election campaign technology in India is Prashant Kishor, a strategist whose roots also lie in Bihar. After a stint with the United Nations, Kishor returned to India and turned campaigning into a precise science.
Using mobile technology and data analytics, he led Modi’s campaign in Gujarat in 2012, which marked a decisive shift in India’s political strategy and campaigning.
Kishor soon parted ways with Modi. In the years that followed, he lent his expertise to several political clients, including the formidable Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar in 2015 and Amarinder Singh in Punjab in 2017 and then to Mamata Banerji in West Bengal.
His strategies, often imitated but never duplicated, have since given rise to a new industry in Indian politics, with parties and candidates investing heavily in tech-savvy, customised election strategies.
His colleague Shivam Shankar Singh emphasises the evolution of electoral strategies in his insightful book “How to Win Elections in India”.
He says that the portrayal of Modi as a “tea seller” in the 2014 election campaign was no accident. Rather, it was a carefully crafted narrative to emphasise his humble origins and appeal to a broad section of the population to counter the elitist image of the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi in particular.
An effective combination of campaigns on the ground and online created an atmosphere of negativity against the Congress and the Gandhi family.
According to the book, such an atmosphere was created through a lot of hard work and constant repetition to instill an idea in the minds of the public, and today modern technology has played a big part in this.
According to the book, almost all parties now hire professionals to take care of the marketing department of their election campaigns. They have been entrusted with the reins of television adverts, election songs, poster graphics and newspaper advertisements.
Along with Prashant Kishor, Shivam Shankar Singh took charge of Congress leader Amrinder Singh’s campaign for the 2017 Punjab assembly elections. He says that at the beginning of the campaign, he realised that Amarinder Singh was being addressed as Maharaja because of his royal lineage.
Since he was contesting against the Aam Aadmi Party, which invokes the common man, they advised Singh to first shed this Maharaja image and call himself Captain as he had held that post in the Indian Army. Thus, the slogan Captain of Punjab was created.
“We made him visit 77 constituencies, liaise with the people, take suggestions from them, and include them in his speeches and promises. When people saw that he was taking and then speaking their suggestions, they also voted for him,” Singh writes in his book.
Election campaign based on algorithms
Singh later parted ways with Kishor and joined the BJP under party general secretary Ram Madhav to work as a full-time staffer at their campaign headquarters. He oversaw the northeastern states to unleash the power of data-driven campaigning.
His team’s efforts were instrumental in the BJP’s significant electoral successes in Assam and especially in Tripura, a state long ruled by communists.
According to the book, the algorithm they developed divided each booth into weak, strong, and favourable categories and distributed resources accordingly. Unlike Amrinder Singh, Manik Sarkar, who led a communist government in Tripura for two decades, was a simple man and had earned a reputation for being honest and sincere.
In Tripura, there was no scope to make corruption an issue. Working with the data, Singh and his party focused on developing visualisation tools that enabled them to plot data on maps and create other graphical formats such as bar charts and tables to convey a picture of a very backward state due to communist rule.
By tailoring their strategies to local sentiments and utilising social media effectively, they managed to drastically change public opinion. The BJP won in Tripura and its vote share increased from just one percent to 36 percent.
Singh also credits the power of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for the BJP’s victories. The RSS has appointed Pana Pramukhs across the country, who are incharge of one page of the voters’ list, more precisely 60 voters. They are foot soldiers, who collect data and remain in touch with the voters.
Once the electoral strategists enter the castes and religions of voters in the software, the next step is to get their phone numbers from digital brokers, which they get from ordinary employees of telecom companies or SIM card dealers.
Currently, there are 535 million WhatsApp users in India. Singh says that, unlike other countries, voters in India feel proud to be members of groups and trust the messages that are shared in the groups. Singh warns that this is a dangerous trend.
On September 2, 2018, a video of a poor beggar was circulated showing that a Hindu godman had been beaten up by Muslims. The rumour mill was buzzing on all social media platforms. When the police clarified a day later that the man was not a Hindu ascetic but a drug addict, who had molested a Hindu woman, and that the woman’s brother and her husband had beaten him up, this had by then triggered a frenzy against Muslims.
Hindu-centred narrative of the BJP
Singh says it is not just about the technology but also about the narratives that are woven into the campaigns. The BJP is focused on building a Hindu-centric narrative, often at the expense of Muslims.
From his own experience, he says that they are always asked to remind Hindus that a mosque was built by Muslim leaders by demolishing a Hindu temple. This is not a random slogan but a trademark of the BJP.
The results of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly elections, in which the BJP and its allies won 325 out of 400 seats without fielding a single Muslim candidate.
Singh believes that since BJP wants to win elections by retaining its Hindu constituency, an increasing polarisation benefits the party.
Besides Muslims, intellectuals belonging to the left wing have also been categorised as enemies and Modi himself has used words for them like Urban Naxals and gangs splintering the nation.
There has been an attempt to create a narrative for the poor that they are poor because the previous governments appeased the Muslims. The Congress-led Karnataka government’s recent affirmative action programme for poor Muslims is being portrayed by Modi as taking away resources from the backward Hindu castes.
While such strategies are electorally effective, they raise profound questions about the long-term social costs.
As India moves towards more technologically sophisticated and narrative-driven campaigns, the role of strategists like Kishor and Singh will only grow. However, the ethical dimensions of such strategies need to be scrutinised.
Are we witnessing a shift towards a more transparent and informed electorate, or are these sophisticated tools increasing the possibilities of manipulation?
The landscape of Indian politics is changing and is being shaped by the twin forces of technological innovation and the strategic construction of narratives.
As political parties adapt to these new realities, voters must also evolve by becoming more discerning and critical of the information they consume. The future of Indian democracy may well depend on this delicate balance between persuasion and manipulation.
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