The recent Legislative Assembly
election campaigns have seen a dramatic change in the communication,
particularly political communication, is conducted. While PR Narendra Modi is
credited for dramatically transforming or even disrupting the political
communication, the opposition too had its own share of initiatives. PRapport
initiates a debate among communication professionals to analyse and
understand lessons from the new communication regime - what was right and
what we wrong.
We at PRCI did make a beginning
during our 11th Global Communication Conclave with a discussion on Disruption
– Political Communication with a Fireside Chat with BJP political strategist
Ashwani Singla. Now we take this
forward.
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By S.Narendra*
India has
successfully completed another cycle
of free and fair elections. The latest
poll cycle witnessed several new features
in poll campaign communication.
According to a BJP leader in UP, the battle strategy aimed at winning ‘booth by booth’ (there were 150000 poll
booths).For this purpose the party deployed lakhs of foot-soldiers for personally connecting with
the voters. The foot-soldiers efforts
in the field were coordinated
through mobile phones and social media.
In a first of
its kind, BJP gathered inputs from
thousands of voters for preparing its
manifesto. Such crowd sourcing and deployment of foot-soldiers seems to have
created a groundswell. The 3-D communication-that is, multi-screen projection
of election BJP rallies, especially that of PM rallies, (first unveiled in 2012
Gujarat poll), was very much in play. At each such venue, a bank of plug-and -play
facility was created for news channels to take their feed which went a long way
in getting free airtime. Perhaps , relative absence of broadband connectivity limited the scope for streaming PM’s rallies
from one centre to others.
A notable aspect
was the seamless mixing of traditional campaign mode with the state-of-the art
technology by the two main contenders-BJP and SP. The latter, as the ruling party spent hundreds of crore of rupees from
government funds for showcasing its performance (Kaam Bolta hai) and its
young chief minister. SP’s incumbency handicap
was also palpable. The Incumbency
burden in this case meant that the voters had taken for granted any
development initiatives of the outgoing
government. And, rerunning
its such achievements in TV
spots and other media without
unveiling SP’s future agenda failed to rally the voters. The government communication usually tends to throw information at people without packaging
such ‘achievement information’
into a political message .
The BJP on the
other hand, enjoyed the advantage of
presenting the Union Government’s several
on-going pro-people
programmes which were not
being effectively implemented by SP state government . The Centre’s dominant presence on social media
like mygov.com site, apps and
social media and on TV and radio could not be matched by other parties., And, PM himself adroitly put
himself as the champion of the
poor against the rich and took almost personal responsibility for lifting UP
out of its under-development.
The opposition
attack on demonitization seems to have backfired as the people perceived the
step as a blow against the rich and the
corrupt. As the theatre of Ram Janmabhoomi movement and demolition of the Babri
Masjid in 1992, one expected BJP to revive the emotional Ram temple issue. Surprisingly,
the issue did not dominate the political discourse.
A sub-text to
the political communication was the BJP’s clever weaving of the social divide represented by Dalits,
OBCs and Upper castes into its seat
distribution arrangement. Although BJP totally ignored giving any
representation to Muslims (16% of the state population), and its opponents attempted to paint BJP as anti-minorities,
such factors did not significantly swing voters away from BJP. This is one
mystery of this election campaign communication
that needs to be carefully studied.
An important
point to note is that both conventional media and social media, howsoever
intensively they are deployed, have their limitations. Such limitations can be
overcome only when they are enjoined with IPC
or inter-personal communication for micro-messaging. In this case, the
BJP’s massive numbers of foot-soldiers were empowered with messages using
social media.
And, more
importantly, they became the listening posts,
sending feed- back to central
strategists. At the helm was an untiring, towering foot-soldier in the form of Narendra Modi.
He was both the media and the message phenomenon. Opposition withered away.
PS: One of the first Communication needs assessment,
CNA, studies commissioned by the Election Commission (designed and supervised
by me), established that Voters were influenced more by IPC that is, when they discussed issues with friends and other known
people. The latter tended to be information consumers of media and eager to be
Jaankars. My recommendation to ECI was to reach out to such Jaankars who could
relay messages to actual voters who may or may not access media. In traditional
societies, IPC tends to be more effective. (*The
author is a former Information adviser to PM and government spokesperson. He can
be reached at sunarendra@gmail.com)
