With just about every party availing of the services of election marketing strategists in Uttar Pradesh, the entire exercise becomes a zero-sum game because voters get competing signals from different sources, enabling them to deconstruct the propaganda. It is in this context of competitive electoral propaganda that one witnesses the irony of political marketing experts becoming indispensable to political parties even as their effectiveness in selling the artificial virtues of their candidates as natural attributes is diminishing day by day.
That is why, after scripting the victories of the BJP in 2014 and the Mahagathbandhan in Bihar in 2015, the leader of the political marketing species, Prashant Kishor cuts a sorry figure today as his current client Congress’ successive announcements in UP betray utter confusion in the party. His team of paid young professionals educated in the IITs, IIMs and with previous experience in multinational corporations like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, though excellent in data-analysis and focused planning, are found wanting in understanding political nuances, especially in the complex scenario of UP.
Kishor’s political consultancy India Political Action Committee (IPAC) started off with the high-pitched Khat Rallies and Kisan Yatras led by Rahul Gandhi. Realising the prevailing agrarian distress and the aloofness of the BJP’s Union government to the issue, the Congress was advised to exploit the issue by organising measures like Kisan Mang Patras. The party claimed to have received petitions from more than one crore farmers in the State. To give the agenda a tangible presence, big glittering banners were unfurled with the slogan, ‘Karza maaf, bijli bill half, samarthan moolya ka karo hisaab” (loans will be waived, electricity bills halved and the minimum support price increased). Further, to highlight the overall distress prevailing in the State in general and farmers in particular, the party adopted another slogan, ‘27 saal UP behaal’ (UP is in chaos since 27 years).
However, all these well-articulated strategies don’t seem to have cut ice on the ground. How can a party that projected a chief ministerial candidate not so long ago suddenly become all too eager to play second fiddle to Akhilesh Yadav?
In fact, the absurdity of the technocratic class making political strategy based on MBA-ised marketing principles while lacking a sense of the deeper sociological and cultural nuances is reflected in the Congress posters: they disproportionately highlight Rahul Gandhi while ignoring the image of Indira Gandhi, the only Congress leader who still fares well in the memory of voters in the State. The obsession with treating political leaders as a market product to be converted into brands through glittering ads more often than not leads to blunders such as the missing pictures of Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the BJP’s campaign posters and of Indira Gandhi in the Congress strategy.
Consequently, hyperaggressive electoral marketing only helps a party acquire a ‘perception advantage’, wherein a majority of voters tend to assume that the contest is between the parties most visible in the public spaces through their advertisements. Yet, they may end up voting for a party that was grossly underestimated in terms of campaign visibility. Here lies the clue as to why a majority of election surveys are grossly off the mark. In UP, the BSP is rendered in the third position by a majority of the electoral surveys, precisely on account of the erroneous method of treating the artificially gauged perceptions of respondents as their actual preference.
The BSP tends to maintain a distance from the mainstream media, a fact reflected in the party not appointing any official spokesperson. It does compete on social media where its updates are clumsy and old fashioned in comparison to the high pitch campaign of other parties. Slogans like “Kaho dil se, Behanji phir se” (Behanji once again), may seem dull vis a vis slogans coined by consultancy-managed parties, but taking slogans as representative of their edge would be a epistemic fallacy as the reality and societal wisdom, barring a few exceptional contexts, are mostly understated.
(Sajjan Kumar, a PhD from Centre for Political Studies/JNU, is associated with People’s Pulse, a Hyderabad-based research organisation specialising in fieldwork-based political and electoral studies).