Game-changing Indian elections: Decoding mega political theatre

CHENNAI: Democracy in India takes its larger-than-life 'avataar' during election time, the media bringing out its vibrancy. With barely two weeks to go for yet another massive exercise of people going to the polls in the 2019 Lok Sabha (LS) elections, this is an incisive book to be read carefully.

The moral of the story goes like this: It's unwise to expect a feel good factor, as the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, have wittingly or unwittingly, brought about a major shift in the way the electoral space is contested.  It gives rise to a whole of range of 'feelings' in its widest, intuitive sense the 19thcentury English idealist Philosopher FH Bradley meant, and whose cardinal work was 'Appearance and Reality'. From angst, surprise to exuberance, everything is there and not there.
Some contemporary Indian Philosophers even called Bradley "Shankara of the West", a comparison that would now draw the ire of the 'new purifiers'. But this does not detract from the fact Indian elections are still an engrossing saga of interplay of multiple episodes, institutions, parties, media and ideologies.

Two highly qualified media professionals - Prof Jaishri Jethwaney, a long-standing faculty at the premier Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), New Delhi, and Dr Samir Kapur, a senior PR professional and a visiting faculty at IIMC - have in this well researched and elegantly written book, 'When India Votes - The Dynamics of Successful Election Campaigning - brought out the interplay of these factors, the points of divergence and convergence to make general elections look like, as they put it a 'Maha Kumbh', a massive festival of the people.

As the authors put it succinctly, "every election seals the fate of parties, ideologies and candidates. There are many reasons behind the success and failure of parties and candidates, but the preparation of an election has become a full-time, 24x7, 365-day industry, which includes lakhs of people employed in opinion polling, brand strategy, advertising, publicity, public relations, event management, speech writing and social media." The plate is more than full.

In the post-Nehruvian years, in a sense every general election has been a watershed election. For example in 1967, when for the first time regional parties in several states including Tamil Nadu, after Independence, gave the Congress a jolt, though Kerala was the first state to elect a Communist government.  

However, from a deeper historical standpoint, 1977 Lok Sabha polls, after Mrs Indira Gandhi lifted the internal Emergency, was the first massive demonstration of democratic change through the ballot box by the people. Since then, almost every general election has qualified for the heroic description 'watershed election', though it may be for different reasons. Thus, the concept of 'watershed election' itself becomes a 'family-resemblance' term, with nuanced semantics.
For example, the authors point out, "The 1984 elections can be said to be a watershed in India's campaigning style and strategies." "High budgets, the branding of parties and politicians, and the entry of top-notch advertising agencies began with this election."

Eventually, it is all a few people at the top who trigger a new dynamics. In the case of 1984, as they describe, the backdrop of the political developments within the country and outside help draw the big picture; the tumultuous 1980s' saw "the rise of terrorism in Punjab, increased militancy in J and K" and closer home the ethnic strife in Sri Lanka and its spillover into Tamil Nadu. And after 'Operation Bluestar', Mrs. Indira Gandhi was shot by her own security guards, followed by unprecedented anti-Sikh riots.

These developments formed the settings of the huge Indian political theatre of those years. And after the mantle was passed to Rajiv Gandhi, the authors write, "a reticent Rajiv Gandhi depended on his close friend Arun Singh and cousin Arun Nehru, who it is believed suggested the name of the advertisement agency, Rediffusion for the top job, with Arun Nanda, the proprietor, himself taking the brief with his team from the Prime Minister." And the ad campaigns, mainly targeting the print medium then, run by Rediffusion was such a huge success, despite Mrs. Gandhi's assassination turning the very ethos of the campaign.

Apart from tracing the political background of each general election, the defining moments so to say, the authors have lucidly captured the changes in the style, rhetoric, substance and the issues underpinning each of the poll campaigns, more intensively since 1984. The dynamics over the next 30 years, has not just contributed to a more pronounced rightward-shift in the Indian polity, culminating in the open 'Hindutva' campaign in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls under a charismatic BJP leader Narendra Modi; it has also been manifesting the changing class and caste equations, post-Mandal (the great adopted Raja of Manda, V.P. Singh and his anti-Bofors campaign), the VHP's Ramjanmabhoomi campaign which a shrewder L K Advani took over with his 'Rath Yatra' from Somnath to Ayodhya, economic liberalisation spearheaded by Dr Manmohan Singh under PM Narasimha Rao's tenure, to the 'Gujarat model' of reordering societal preferences and development that Mr. Modi is now pushing at the national level.

The authors suggest that all these have not only been, slowly but surely, redrawing the contours of Indian democracy and elections, but also shows how the media, including television and the Internet, have been playing a key role in influencing this process. These raise larger issues of truth, objectivity and subjectivity. The authors have sought to contextualise this wider debate, underpinned by theoretical frameworks in politics, with a sprinkling from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky, albeit briefly, media and communication theories as they have evolved in recent decades, even while providing glimpses of key poll campaigns, to drive home how institutions and people re-enact the opera of democracy.

What is particularly interesting about the 'branding' of Narendra Modi, as the authors explain, despite the incumbent PM's "disdain" for the media being well known with his direct communication with the people at large, thanks to the new social media including 'Twitter', is that he changed the very texture of the election campaign in 2014. The 'brand Modi' strategy included reshaping the traditional image of BJP as being "communal and intolerant" to a discourse of secularism versus pseudo-secularism and development, notwithstanding the shadow of the 2002 Gujarat riots, argue the authors.

Brand experts, the authors draw attention to, has thus termed the 2014 LS poll campaign, as a "photo-finish in brand building". Atal Behari Vajpayee was traditional but flexible, but for the average voter, with the urban middle class and upper castes getting more vocal around a 'Hindu' identity, cheered by success stories of sizeable NRIs abroad, 'Brand Modi' meant action in national interest.

A man of humble origins fighting corruption became the BJP's mascot - the Man himself, not so much the BJP's policies - challenging the opposition at every step and his "presidential style of campaigning", were two attempts to "redefine Indian politics" itself, the authors contend, adding, a large section of the Indian media supported this approach amid a declining Congress.    

 So what does 2019 LS polls portend? That is beyond the scope of the authors' present work, but they have flagged certain key issues for the political class, media and society at large to reflect. They include the impact of more "professional publicists and campaigners" in any election now, Governments being in "constant campaign mode", "deteriorating standards of political discourse", "media polarisation" and the malady of "paid news". Indian democracy, despite its flaws, is still a "great story", the authors say, but caution that the issues flagged need to be addressed "before it is too late."