They do math on the masses

The election may not have been won or lost by him — in all probability, it wasn’t. Yet it is the moment of the election strategist.

This prominence of the strategist may be a relatively new phenomenon in our country but it is not sudden. The story, as we know it, can be traced at least as far back as the glitzy Lok Sabha campaign in 2004. That was when Pramod Mahajan’s high-tech “war room” in the national capital became a talking point. There was talk of “carpetbombing” constituencies in the countryside with “national” leaders flown in from Delhi. “India Shining” was pitted against “Congress ka haath, aam aadmi ke saath” in which “aam aadmi” had just replaced “garib”. Media management, marketing strategy, professional constituency profiling and salesmanship were becoming an acceptable part of politicalspeak.

In all of this, the BJP has been the leader by far. The Congress has followed — barely and poorly. Though single-party dominance collapsed at the political centre in 1989 and was never put back together again, the Congress is yet to land on its feet in the more competitive political terrain. Most of all, it has still to learn to tell stories about itself and package them attractively. The BJP, on the other hand, has relentlessly and expertly used the media in taking the fight to its more entrenched opponent. Of course, strategists have far more room to package the party — and themselves — in the BJP. In the Congress, all victories are naturally to be attributed to the high command, only failure needs to be explained.

The rise of the strategist in our political parties has its ironies. We still don’t have a strategist in the sense of a Karl Rove or a James Carville, a professional who has sensed an underlying trend that few others have noticed, and is adept at tailoring political messages to electorally encash it. Be it Mahajan then or Jaitley now, it is still the politician in our country who is turning his attention to finetuning the campaign and its message, which may or may not have anything to do with the politics or position of the candidate or party. The professional help that they hire as they go along remains mostly anonymous.

As political parties in India try to catch up with their more organised Western counterparts on this specific count, their deliberate cultivation of incoherence in all other respects stands out even more. Parties in India — with the exception of the Left parties — still refuse to lay down settled and predictable procedures for almost everything that they do, from the selection of candidates to the framing of an agenda. They are run in wholly arbitrary and opaque ways, by one or a few leaders at the top, who manipulate factional strife to their advantage.

The growing prominence of the election strategist in our political context raises some questions. Is it an inevitable trend, the “professionalisation” of the business of politics in “mature” democracies? Or does the rise of the strategist have something to do with the rise of the politician unsure of his own ground? Is the increasingly feverish reliance of political parties on the election strategist related to their reluctance to undertake political mobilisations in between polls? Does the voter stand to gain or lose from this phenomenon?

It is certainly changing the way we talk about our politics. Nowhere is this framed more sharply — or in more jarring ways — than in the political chatter about “social coalitions”.

In the just concluded assembly polls in Karnataka, the Congress, we were told, was putting together an alliance of the lower backward castes, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Muslims. The BJP’s coalition was said to place the Lingayats at the centre. Traditionally, as political scientist James Manor has described in his work, parties and governments in Karnataka at least since 1972 have tended towards collective leadership in rainbow coalitions. In 1972, Chief Minister Devraj Urs broke the dominance of the Lingayats and Vokkaligas in state politics since Independence by mobilising other disadvantaged groups. This is also the reason why Karnataka experienced little conflict during the Mandal tumult in 1990. So why did the talk of social coalitions jar this time?

Perhaps it had to do with the sense that this time in Karnataka, both the Congress and BJP were much more precise about the math of the social coalition, but far more fuzzy about the rest. This time, “social coalition” was an invocation palpably more bloodless than before. Going by the reportage, much less was asked, and even less was told, about the issues specific to the Lingayats, Vokkaligas, OBCs, SCs, STs in Karnataka, or the ones they faced in common.

The art of election management has arguably been with us for as long as democratic politics. But as it takes surer strides and monopolises prime public spaces, it seems to elbow out our already dwindling reserves of political empathy. One can only hope that the magnificent political challenges in diverse constituencies across India’s complex landscape will administer a rebuke or a reality check.

vandita.mishra@expressindia.com