There's nowhere to hide, your Lok Sabha candidates are out to get you. First they plastered your walls with election posters, now they will bombard you with telephone calls and e-mails. This week the BJP’s spin doctors announced a new mass contact movement to woo the voter in the run-up to the general elections. The rolling roadshow is clearly not enough for the party of yatras, it must now traverse the information highway. In the BJP’s brand new interactive campaign, the potential voter will be updated on the candela counts of India’s Shine and, in return, offered a range of accessories: political ringtones, campaign merchandise and lotus screensavers. And if the BJP’s rain men don’t grab you, chances are its allies and rivals are already plotting their own e-campaigns. Spam? Privacy? What’s a little intrusiveness in the time of elections. Old-timers may be given to a little alarm. They would perhaps hark back to a golden age when a candidate would dutifully wend her way through her constituency, striking one-to-ones with voters and patiently explaining the interface between local concerns and national parties. The profusion of means of disseminating information, they would say, has been accompanied by a fragmentation of political discourse. Policy statements, they’d wail, have been replaced by spiffy slogans. Maybe. But recent elections have seen the emergence of campaigning as a professionally assisted venture. In the assembly elections in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the BJP approached its campaign like a scientific experiment — microsurveys and catch-all slogans were mixed to merge local variations and brand building. The Congress, too, has been making moves in that direction. When she embarks on her roadshows, Sonia Gandhi makes a visible effort to sport the region’s textiles and strike a chord with a local touch — her emotive pitch, for instance, about her mother-in-law wanting to retire to Himachal Pradesh. Will it work? At election time, contestants use every trick in the book to court voters — filmstars, cricketers, political manifestoes set to movie melodies, advertisement blitzes, everything. Keep innovating, we say, in this electoral marketplace there’s only one buyer: the voter.
