2014: The Election That Changed India (36 page)

In June 2013, Ajay Maken was put in charge of the
Congress’s communication department. Maken had proved to be an enthusiastic sports minister,
and the party was hoping he would bring some of that energy to this key post ahead of the elections.
His predecessor, Janardhan Dwivedi, was an old-world neta who preferred poetry to sound bites. I got
the feeling that he was part of that frustrated group within the Congress who actually derived
vicarious pleasure from seeing the government embarrassed. Congress gossip was that Dwivedi had been
given the job because he had taught Hindi to Sonia Gandhi!

Maken’s first task was to try and ensure that
the Congress got its most eloquent voices to speak up for the party. His team prepared an exhaustive
list of leaders to appear on television. But as a Maken
aide put it,
‘It was a thankless task. None of our major leaders who were now ministers wanted to come on
TV debates.’ I asked one of the ministers what the reason was. He said, ‘Why should we
come on a cockfight on television and make a fool of ourselves!’

Some Congress ministers like Anand Sharma made it
clear to Maken that they would only appear in occasional one-on-one interviews. ‘You
don’t expect us to be on the same debate as some junior spokesperson of the BJP,’ Sharma
said, somewhat dismissively. Even Manish Tewari, who was once their main pugilist on television, was
now an information and broadcasting minister. ‘I am now part of the government, so I
can’t speak freely on every issue,’ was his explanation.

It was a familiar excuse. The UPA government
wasn’t short of effective speakers. Individuals like Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, Jyotiraditya
Scindia and Sachin Pilot would have made a formidable communication team. But they shunned the media
like wounded lions, with barely concealed rage, believing that 24/7 news was responsible for most of
the UPA’s misfortunes. Till 2010, Chidambaram, easily the government’s most cerebral
politician, would even offer to come to the studio. Now, neither he nor any potentially credible
voice was ready to get into the hurly-burly of ‘noise’ television. It almost seemed as
if the cacophony over the Anna agitation and the string of scams had forced the government’s
key interlocutors to surrender a crucial public space. In 2009, many of them had led the Congress
charge; now they had gone missing in action. Their silence only added to the cloud of doom and gloom
hanging over the party.

By contrast, the BJP had packed its ranks with
Smriti Irani, Piyush Goyal, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Nirmala Sitharaman, Meenakshi Lekhi, even Arun
Jaitley, each a doughty fighter for the cause. The party was well prepared for the war on
television. As an Opposition party, it was perhaps a shade easier to be aggressive. The BJP had a
standard operating media drill in place for the election. Every morning at around 10.30, there would
be a tele-conference of all the BJP spokespersons to decide the official stance on an issue. By
3 p.m., the party would have decided which spokesperson would be assigned to
which news channel.

Under Maken’s watch, the Congress belatedly
attempted a similar media plan, only their cupboard appeared bare in contrast. Unlike the BJP, many
senior Congress spokespersons were contesting the elections and were not available in Delhi. In
desperation, the Congress rehabilitated Dr Abhishek Singhvi, its long-serving lawyer-spokesperson.
Singhvi had been out in the cold for over a year after being caught on tape in a sex CD. The party
also turned to the urbane Shashi Tharoor, aware that he might lend some gravitas to their side in
debates. But Tharoor, too, was often tied up in his own election battle in Thiruvananthapuram.
‘Too many news channels, too few credible faces,’ is how a member of the party’s
media cell summed up the Congress problem.

The Congress’s plight was exemplified by one
of its newer spokespersons, Sanjay Jha. I had met Jha almost a decade ago when he was involved in a
cricket website. He struck me as a nice, regular Mumbai guy. He ran a successful leadership training
business, was a member of all the right clubs, liked his sport and did the occasional writing.

Suddenly in 2012, I found Jha appearing on
television channels as a founder of a website, HamaraCongress.com, designed, he says, to change the
Congress’s negligible presence on the Internet. A year later, he was made an official
spokesperson of the Congress. Soon, he was speaking on three or even four channels on a single
night. It seemed a spectacular rise for someone who had never fought even a local election.
‘Doing multiple shows in a single day can be exacting, but I had the passion for a fight and
strongly believed that the Congress is part of India’s DNA, its ethos,’ he told me.

Jha made a valiant attempt, but he often seemed to
be a lamb to the slaughter. He had debating skills but on many occasions, he just didn’t have
the political weight to take on his more influential counterparts. Do nightly television debates
make a difference to the voter? Maybe not. News television, especially English news TV, occupies a
very small space in the overall TV universe. But it does
add to the surround
sound during an elections and has acquired an almost monstrously larger-than-life image in the lives
of opinion makers. It can, importantly, set the news agenda. In 2009, I would hear the chattering
classes gush over how the Congress had come out looking so strong in the Indo-US nuclear debate on
TV. In 2014, the talk was all about how the Congress spokespersons were defending the indefensible,
be it 2G or inflation. A senior Congress leader admitted to me, ‘You know, every time Renuka
Chaudhary tries to shout and filibuster her way through a debate, we lose another 100
votes!’

But in the media clash of 2014, television had
competition too—the war in cyberspace, especially social media, was about to change the rules
of old-style debates and political jousts. It was to prove, in many ways, the ultimate triumph of
not just an individual, but the idea of ‘Team Modi’.

Narendra Modi joined Facebook and Twitter in late
2009. It wasn’t the kind of spectacular big-bang entry that the BJP leader normally likes. For
the first two years, Modi didn’t set the popular social networking sites on fire. In 2011, he
still had barely 6 lakh followers on his Facebook page. His Twitter following, too, was well behind
that of someone like Shashi Tharoor’s, who was really the first Indian politician to join the
Twitterati.

By the time the elections were over in May, Modi had
a staggering 1.5 million ‘likes’ on his Facebook page, second only to US President Obama
in terms of his fan following. Through 2014, Modi had, according to a Facebook spokesperson, the
fastest growing page of any politician worldwide. ‘Facebook was our mother site which drove
our social media campaign,’ says a Modi aide. Several individuals set up their own Modi
Facebook pages—for example, a volunteer called Vikas Pandey set up an ‘I support
Modi’ page, another had a ‘NaMo for PM’ page, all of which became aggregators to
the Modi social media machine.

On Twitter, too, the Modi
base kept increasing. By the time the elections were done and dusted, Modi had 4.27 million Twitter
followers. According to Twitter India, five of the top ten election tweets had been sent from
Modi’s account. They included a selfie with his mother and a victory tweet.

Contrast it with Rahul Gandhi. The Congress’s
‘youth’ talisman wasn’t even on the world’s two most popular sites for youth
interactivity. I asked a Congress social media cell member why. ‘You know, Rahulji
doesn’t like impersonal communication. If he is to get on Twitter, he would like to handle his
account himself and, frankly, he doesn’t have the time for it,’ was the explanation I
was given.

Modi didn’t handle his own Twitter and
Facebook page. That was done by a team of hired professionals based out of Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar
and other smaller centres. Leading them was Hiren Joshi, a computer science lecturer in a college in
Bhilwara, Rajasthan, who had been assigned as OSD to Modi. It was this team that ensured a constant
engagement on Twitter. Joshi first met Modi when he attended a function for computer engineers which
had been organized by the Gujarat government in 2009. Apparently, a technical glitch developed at
the meeting which Joshi solved instantaneously. Modi was impressed enough to recruit Joshi to lead
his social media outreach—one more evidence of his talent-spotting skills. It was Joshi who
would provide Modi a daily late-night update on his Twitter messages, supervise all Twitter
interactions, and help translate Modi’s Twitter account into half a dozen regional
languages.

‘We had a clear goal—don’t allow
the buzz around Modiji to drop through the election, keep our leader and what he says and does
trending all the time,’ says a Modi social media team member.

Statistically, it was as one-sided as it could get.
According to Twitter India, during the elections a total of 56 million election-related tweets were
sent out. Modi was mentioned in 11.1 million tweets, almost 20 per cent of the total traffic. Arvind
Kejriwal was next with 5 million (9 per cent) and Rahul Gandhi well behind with just 1.2 million
tweets (or 2 per cent).

Kejriwal was at least giving
Modi a fight on the social media meter. A small team working out of the party headquarters in Delhi
and wired to NRI supporters would work tirelessly to take on the BJP media machine or raise funds
for the party through crowdsourcing. ‘We found social media a relatively cheap and effective
way to take our message forward,’ is how Kejriwal put it to me.

That a party which was just a year old was scoring
better than the Congress on the social media meter reflects just how ill prepared Rahul’s team
was. In the ‘pappu’ (Rahul) versus ‘feku’ (Modi) hashtag war, there was
again only one clear leader. Every time, Rahul spoke, BJP supporters would swarm all over the social
media and start trending ‘pappu’ to ridicule him. The Congress then hit back by
labelling Modi a ‘feku’ (braggart), but it was more of a reactive move.

‘The BJP had a head start over us and started
well before the Gujarat election campaign of 2012. We really focused on social media only at the end
of 2013,’ concedes Congress MP Deeepinder Hooda who was in charge of the party’s social
media cell, while also fighting his own election from Rohtak.

Hooda says while the BJP successfully
‘personalized’ their social media campaign around Modi, the Congress strategy was to
make it about the organization instead. ‘One big learning for us is that individuals
invariably draw more traction than organizations on the social media,’ is how he put it.
Admits another Congress media cell member, ‘We treated this as some kind of a mechanical
exercise without attempting any kind of real innovation to engage with more people.’

The BJP’s social media team, by contrast, was
innovating all the time. On every voting day, they would send out personalized messages on Twitter
encouraging people to go out and vote. ‘We used Facebook and Twitter to make micro messaging
part of our election strategy, a bit like what Obama did in the US,’ is how a Team Modi member
described it.

Social media collapsed the distance between voter
and politician. The personal connect worked. For example, just ahead of a rally in Hyderabad, a Modi
follower tweeted how his elderly mother was a
great fan of the BJP leader and
wanted to meet him. The local BJP unit was asked to contact the woman—she was brought on stage
and Modi sought her blessings. ‘It was just the kind of human touch we were looking
for,’ says a Modi aide.

The Modi selfie when he went out to vote was another
good example. ‘A prime ministerial candidate putting out a selfie—what could be a better
symbol of a tech-friendly leader? It was bound to be a super-hit,’ says the aide. The selfie
with the black-and-white lotus had another function. By holding up the election symbol designed to
look exactly the way it looked on the EVM (in black and white and not saffron) and by associating
his face with it (for those voters keen to vote for Modi, if not the BJP), Modi had put into the
public space an image both viral-worthy and politically communicative (in fact, Modi would use the
black-and-white lotus symbol as a lapel on his kurta in all public interactions from 7 April 2014,
the first day of polling, if only to reinforce the party’s logo in the eyes of potential
voters).

Modi has always liked technology as much as he likes
wearing designer kurtas. He had started his website back in 2002 when few politicians even glanced
at the Internet. An old Modi associate recalls how the seasoned politician was almost childlike when
he was gifted an electronic diary once. ‘He just likes to play around with some new tech
device. He may not have the time to learn it always, but he just likes to be seen with it,’ is
how the friend describes Modi’s tech-savvy avatar.

Modi was also aware of what was being tweeted about
him. Once during a phone conversation, he suddenly said,
‘Arre, tum aur tumhari biwi aaj
kal bahut Twitter pe ho!’
(You and your wife are on Twitter a lot). Sagarika had just
tweeted about how Modi should have acknowledged his wife Jasodhaben much earlier. Without mentioning
the specific tweet, Modi had sent out the message he wanted to.