2014: The Election That Changed India (37 page)

Even if Modi didn’t look closely at his
tweets, his team and followers certainly did. If the Gandhi family had their political chamchas,
Modi had his ‘Internet Hindus’ (or bhakts, as I called
them). I
often found myself facing the ire of what appeared as an organized, systematic campaign of hate and
abuse against anyone who didn’t follow the prescribed narrative. Their social media profile
usually was ‘Proud Hindu nationalist. Want Namo for PM.’ Internet Hindus are highly
organized and motivated, and demolishing the narratives and reputations of mainstream media
practitioners is their avowed objective.

My worst moment with this group came when I tweeted,
‘While NaMo travels the country, my Nemo needs to be taken for a walk in the park. Different
folks, different priorities!’ It was an innocuous, if perhaps ill-advised attempt at
wordplay—my beagle Nemo had been named after my daughter Tarini’s favourite movie,
Finding Nemo
. The bhakts were unimpressed and let off a volley of abuse on social media. A
few hours later, I got a threatening phone call. ‘You have likened our leader to a dog. You
and your family will pay for this. We will cut you into pieces.’

I was tempted to call the police but decided not to
in the end. I had complained to Modi once about the abuse.
‘Galat hai,’
he
said,
‘lekin mein har vyakti ko kaise rok sakta hoon’
(It is wrong, but how do
I stop everyone who speaks). I found it difficult to accept that a politician who had such
overwhelming control over his party faithful could be so helpless. Maybe it was just a crank call,
but it reflected just how a robust medium of communication could just as easily become a rather
noxious chamber of nastiness.

Were these anonymous Twitter trolls hand in glove
with the BJP party machinery? A BJP insider admitted to me that there was a ‘media
watch’ group of party volunteers who were tasked to ‘take down’ Modi’s
critics. Whether they were ‘paid’ volunteers is unclear (a Cobrapost sting operation had
shown how IT companies could be used to artificially hype up a politician’s image or malign
his opponents). Some of the most abusive Twitter activists seemed to be linked to either pro-BJP
websites or even individual party members. But Arvind Gupta, who headed the BJP’s IT cell,
strongly denied the linkages. ‘No question about it, we would never support such
behaviour,’ he insisted.

I wasn’t convinced. The
campaign was much too organized for it not to have at least some level of endorsement from the
leadership. The ‘HDL’, or Hindu Defence League, on Twitter was like a swarm of bees that
would sting anyone who questioned their political beliefs. This wasn’t healthy debate—it
was vile abuse being spewed under the cloak of anonymity. One of my perennial Internet Hindu abusers
even rang me up once and invited me for a conference on Hinduism. I was tempted to attend, if only
for a bit of fun, but eventually backed off. It isn’t as if parties like the Congress and AAP
don’t have their fair share of Internet trolls, it’s just that they aren’t as
mobilized on social media.

And yet, trolling cannot detract from the more
positive aspects of the BJP’s well-structured social media campaign in 2014. Gupta spoke
passionately about it over lunch at the India Habitat Centre. He struck me as the kind of focused
professional the Congress lacked. An IITian, with a doctoral degree from the US, he had worked in
Silicon Valley before he got a
bulawa
(call) to return to India. A long-time BJP supporter,
he first approached the BJP leadership in 2010 with the idea of setting up a digital strategy for
the party. ‘I was able to convince the party that this was going to be a crucial piece in
future elections,’ he says. In July 2013, he formally set up the rather impressive sounding
National Digital Operations Centre (NDOC) at the party’s headquarters in Delhi with a single
point agenda—how to use digital technology to help win the 2014 election. ‘This
wasn’t a one-day affair—we went through many quarter-finals and semi-finals to get
ourselves prepared for the big match,’ is how he described the planning that went into the
BJP’s ‘Mission 272-plus’.

Three things stood out from my conversation with
Gupta. One was the constant urge for innovation among his team, some of it simple as much as it was
brilliant. For example, his team created a ‘missed call’ system as early as in
2011—you give a missed call to a designated BJP number and a party worker would get back to
you and feed you details of the Modi campaign or you could even volunteer to join it. The BJP got
1.3 million volunteers through this. Another dial-in number allowed you to listen to a Modi rally
live.

Gupta even started Yuva TV,
an Internet channel that would webcast the BJP’s campaign. ‘Our motto was—organize
online for success offline,’ says Gupta. The aim was to use technology to make Modi available
to every Indian across every platform.

The second was the genuine team approach. Their
leader may have been a fierce individualist when it came to his politics, but he had built a crack
team when it came to technology. In Delhi, Gupta was supervising the NDOC which handled the
BJP’s Internet and mobile planning. But he was not alone.

One of the key members of the technology outreach
was Mumbai-based Rajesh Jain, a successful Internet entrepreneur, who in 1999 had sold his
Indiaworld.com venture for Rs 499 crore. Jain was running a mobile data solutions company, Netcom
Solutions, when BJP treasurer Piyush Goyal met him in January 2009, seeking a better rate for
sending out bulk SMSs for the general elections. ‘I was impressed with his strong
“nationalist” desire to see the Congress being replaced by the BJP,’ recalls
Goyal. The two met for dinner with like-minded friends a few days later and their discussions led to
the setting up of an advocacy group, Friends of BJP, with Jain as the convenor.

In May 2011, Jain wrote a remarkably prescient blog
which caught the attention of Modi. ‘The BJP’s approach needs to be to work towards
creating a wave in 2014, across the country and especially in the 330–350 seats where the BJP
is competitive. Switch focus from maximizing allies to maximizing seats for 2014 . . . the party
must change its approach from winning 175 seats to winning 250 to 275 seats.’

For the 2014 elections, Jain created a digital
software system that was truly revolutionary. It would create a voter identity database right down
to the booth level. ‘We could track the smallest of households and use the data to build a
volunteer base at the booth level which is critical in an election,’ a Team Modi member told
me. If anyone wished to volunteer for the Modi campaign, all they needed to do was dial 7820078200
and punch in their voter ID card number. The NaMo volunteer programme was kick-started
in September 2013 soon after Modi was declared the BJP’s prime ministerial
candidate. ‘It was Rajesh who pushed for the “Power of One” voter registration and
the NaMo volunteer programme first, and he did it all with his own money,’ says a BJP leader
admiringly. Along with another IT professional, Bangalore-based B.G. Mahesh, Jain also created the
India272.com portal, a site aimed at further widening the volunteer base for Modi’s campaign.
He also set up the pro-Modi right-wing website Niticentral.com. The low-profile Jain didn’t
want to speak on record, but a BJP leader described him as a ‘real rock star’.

The third key takeaway was the complete 360-degree
approach to the election campaign. When journalists tracking the BJP’s manifesto arrived at
the party headquarters in early April, they were given a pen drive with a film and the contents of
the manifesto. The manifesto release was not just live on television, it was also playing out on the
party websites, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, mobile dial-ins and WhatsApp. From thirty seconds to
thirty minutes, separate videos were created depending on the platform. ‘This was multimedia
carpet-bombing,’ Gupta told me.

Fascinated by the power of the Internet, Modi would
sometimes attend the meetings of the technology team. ‘He’s a great listener. He’d
see the presentations, give us his inputs and then leave us to execute,’ is how one Team Modi
member described the exercise. There was, they insist, very little attempt made by the BJP’s
prime ministerial candidate to micromanage the campaign at any stage.

As in the case with television, it would be an
exaggeration to suggest the digital offensive won Modi the 2014 election. It was, at best, a force
multiplier. Several parts of rural India in particular still aren’t connected to the Net
revolution. But when you look at the millions who now use smartphones—the Internet and mobile
association claims that mobile Internet users had touched 185 million by mid-2014—there is
little doubt that digital media can no longer be ignored in any future election campaign plan.

Indeed, the Internet blitz was another crucial piece
in the reinvention of Modi. For example, by building a large and devout
Twitter following, Modi was able to challenge the monopoly of the traditional media on opinion
making. Modi was always convinced that a large section of the English-language media would never
make him forget the 2002 riots. Now, thousands of handles on Twitter systematically attacked any
narrative that challenged Modi in particular and the BJP in general. Journalists increasingly tend
to follow Twitter like a wire service and watching social media trends has become part of a
reporter’s duties. Thus, by sheer force of numbers, Team Modi wielded social media’s
power over mainstream media’s news priorities. On Facebook, too, he was able to connect to a
wide urban audience that was looking for a leader they could engage with. It became another vital
platform to spread his ideas effectively (13 million people made 75 million Modi-related
interactions during the two election months on Facebook).

Most importantly, the technology push enabled Modi
to consolidate his new image as a modern technocrat-administrator. This was not a pracharak with a
closed shakha mindset, but a leader with an eye to the future. Tech geeks can be ideologically rigid
and illiberal, but technology also symbolizes an egalitarian spirit based on merit and opportunity.
Modi may have been twenty years older than Rahul, but technology helped him look and feel much
younger. No surprise then that his highest ratings were often in the below-thirty age group.

The BJP has often been stereotyped as an ageing
Hindu revivalist party which takes up potentially divisive issues like Ram mandir. The technology
drive gave it a dramatically new avatar as a party that was holding out the dream of a
‘digital democracy’—a nation of mouse, and not snake, charmers, as Modi put it.
For a younger, aspirational India, this was just the kind of message of hope they wanted to hear
from their leadership.

It was now a message that needed to be taken beyond
the digital world. The advertising and media planners were ready to take Brand Modi to the next
level.

In the first week of
February 2014, the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather’s (O&M) executive chairman and
national creative director Piyush Pandey got a call that Narendra Modi wanted to meet him urgently.
Pandey knew Modi from his 2010 Gujarat tourism advertising campaign which had featured Amitabh
Bachchan and had been a huge success. He flew down to Gandhinagar for the meeting. Modi had a simple
request: ‘I want you to handle my advertising campaign. Only you can do this for
me.’

Pandey, with his field marshal-style moustache was
an iconic figure in the advertising industry, having won numerous awards. Modi’s plea put him
in in a slightly awkward position. He had turned down numerous offers to do political advertising in
the past, including from Modi in the 2012 Gujarat elections and from the Congress as well. David
Ogilvy, his guru, had advised against doing work for political parties in his seminal book on
advertising. Modi, though, wasn’t going to take no for an answer. ‘He was extremely
persuasive. Besides, I liked him, felt he was good for India and wanted him to win. I just
couldn’t say no this time!’

When Pandey returned home to Mumbai, Piyush Goyal,
the BJP’s treasurer, who was emerging as a key point person in the media strategy, was waiting
for him with the contract. Two hours later, the deal was done.

Pandey would design and oversee the campaign but in
his personal capacity. Soho Square, a subsidiary of O&M, would handle the BJP account. Madison,
headed by another advertising world powerhouse, Sam Balsara, would do the media buying and planning.
For the next three months—from February to May—this crack team, assisted by BJP party
leaders, well-wishers and professionals, would put together an advertising campaign of the kind an
Indian election had never seen. There would be eighteen-hour days and long nights, but there was a
single-minded obsession—to make Brand Modi simply unassailable.

When the creative team began planning the strategy,
they had three clear goals in mind. First, position Modi as a credible, decisive leader; second,
swing public sentiment among fence sitters; and third,
create a wave that
would push the BJP beyond 272. The approach would be two-fold—target the public anger against
the UPA-II government, and then create a sense of hope that Modi would usher in change. Anger and
hope would become the twin planks of the advertising assault.