With the formal election process only just begun in UP, early pointers to the strategies employed by various parties are evident in their early posters and propaganda material. And a look at political advertisements across UP gives us an insight into the minds of the new crop of professional election-management experts employed by the political parties.
The BJP’s campaign strategy is being managed by the Association of Billion Minds (ABM), many of whose members started their electoral management career with Narendra Modi’s 2014 blitzkrieg campaign executed by Prashant Kishor’s Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG). For the coming elections, the BJP is carpet bombing public spaces with its political ads hoping to gain a perception advantage vis a vis its rivals.
The BJP’s strategy is a repetition of its approach to the 2014 Lok Sabha election and the 2015 Bihar Assembly election. Perception advantage is a strategy by the BJP to use the faces of a chosen few leaders to construct the central narrative of the election around them. Thus, the BJP’s posters, banners, billboards and stickers placed at market squares, important public spaces, along streets of towns show Narendra Modi and Amit Shah occupying the central space, while Rajnath Singh (Rajput), Kalraj Mishra (Brahmin), Uma Bharti (Lodh, OBC) and UP BJP president Keshav Prasad Maurya (Kushwaha, OBC) find place too albeit in miniscule sizes.
Curiously, the face of Atal Bihari Vajpayee is missing from these ads — for the first time since 1980 when the party came into existence. The fact that UP was Vajpayee’s political turf and the BJP needs the numerically significant Brahmin vote, makes the strategy of leaving out his image all the more puzzling. At the party headquarters in Lucknow, we see one lone poster of L K Advani and not one of Vajpayee.
This exclusion of the party’s elders seems to be driven by the party’s twin desire (a) to build the narrative exclusively around Narendra Modi against the backdrop of not projecting any chief ministerial face lest it alienate some castes/communities; and (b) to send a message to the non-Yadav OBC vote bloc promising a joint leadership of Modi at the Centre and Keshav Prasad Maurya in the State. Confident of winning the support of upper castes, the BJP is investing its energies on bidding for this vote bloc by various means, including 200 Pichhda Varg Sammelans (backward class conclaves). Interestingly, it doesn’t have any such programme for the Dalits, which indicates a strategy to focus primarily on castes/communities that are more likely to be won over rather than sections that are already committed to other parties.
The posters indicate the BJP’s strategy to privilege the non-Yadav OBC vote over others in this election. This is a result of the party deciding to end its overdependence on harping on the ‘goonda-raj’ image of the Samajwadi Party because Akhilesh Yadav has emerged as a claimant to the plank of change against lawlessness and hooliganism. Similarly, demonetisation has emerged as an electoral liability that has dented the BJP’s strategy of asking for a mandate in the name of development. Finally, the Ram temple-centred grand Hindutva agenda has reached electoral saturation.
The Akhilesh faction of SP — which in popular perception has emerged as the winner of the tussle within that party — is trying to match the campaign intensity of the BJP by enlisting the services of political consulting company SJB Strategies International, headed by its CEO Steve Jarding, who also happens to be a lecturer at Harvard University where he teaches courses on Campaign Management and Making of a Politician. Reportedly, SP too has adopted the BJP’s standard model of demographic and issue profiling down to the polling booth level, besides privileging the image of its supreme leaders over others. Hence, much before the inner feud in the Mulayam Singh Yadav family unfolded, the image of Akhilesh had already eclipsed the father in the party’s political advertisements. The party’s new posters make personalised appeals to social constituencies like youth, women, farmers, artisans and even businessmen in the name of Akhilesh rather than the collective leadership of the party.
This approach shares the assumption that politics, and elections particularly, are manageable and marketable by mapping the specific grievances of various sections and employing a targeted mix of positive and negative propaganda around those grievances, thereby converting elections as much into psychological warfare as political.
However, these strategies work effectively only when a party or leader has an off-the-blocks advantage over others, as happened in the 2014 LS election. Then, non-BJP parties were not prepared to counter the first-ever 360-degree campaign of the BJP which was centred around Modi and meticulously planned while appearing natural and spontaneous.
Tomorrow: The crowd of poll strategists
(Sajjan Kumar, a PhD from Centre for Political Studies/JNU, is associated with Peoples Pulse, a Hyderabad based research organization specialising in fieldwork-based political and electoral studies).