Poll spam

There8217;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 BJP8217;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 BJP8217;s brand new interactive campaign, the potential voter will be updated on the candela counts of India8217;s Shine and, in return, offered a range of accessories: political ringtones, campaign merchandise and lotus screensavers. And if the BJP8217;s rain men don8217;t grab you, chances are its allies and rivals are already plotting their own e-campaigns. Spam? Privacy? What8217;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 Policy statements, they8217;d wail, have been replaced by spiffy slogans.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 8212; 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 region8217;s textiles and strike a chord with a local touch 8212; 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 8212; filmstars, cricketers, political manifestoes set to movie melodies, advertisement blitzes, everything. Keep innovating, we say, in this electoral marketplace there8217;s only one buyer: the voter.