Into its third Assembly elections, the country’s youngest state opens up multiple ways to reach the voter. Time-tested outdoor and indoor campaigns are very much in place. These are mostly in villages and old towns. What is new is the flash mob mode in response to the kind of cities we are building. The conventional electioneering event needs surplus space as in the vast farmlands of rice growing Suryapet. The state’s first Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao or KCR seeking mandate for his third consecutive term addresses the regular public meeting here with mikes, music, flags and festoons complete with a helicopter descent. The flying machine is no longer a novelty as it was in the vintage R K Laxman cartoon where a village audience gathered around the chopper leaving the visiting dignitary to fend for himself. The other big communicator in this election, Asaduddin Owaisi, knows conversational Telugu, not enough to articulate the way he does in Urdu or English. He has vowed to learn the local language thoroughly post-poll, vital in the new state Telangana whose very name like Tamil Nadu is as linguistic as regional. For now, the AIMIM chief is happy in the studio of an English TV channel, punching above his weight. A new way to message the voter was recently seen at Balanagar in suburban Hyderabad. The Congress workers virtually take over a shopping arcade, mostly in disuse. Sipping tea and browsing the mobile, they sit around lazily till crowds gather in batches to line up first on the pavements below a flyover and closer to the event swell into the entire road. It is only then that the place was cordoned off. The whole evening seems packaged like an extended flash mob – each component well-rehearsed but with no overall script or design. Cops most polite; evening traffic minimally disrupted; audience entertained through the long wait with song, dance, speeches and slogans. The star of the day’s campaign Revanth Reddy, the state Congress president, arrives three hours late. This kind of a wayside event can fit into any hollow in a concrete jungle. What marks the show’s success is not the size of the crowd but for how long it waits: Time replaces space. Given the way we are overbuilding our urban spaces, poll campaigning could go increasingly the flash mob way.
