2014: The Election That Changed India (39 page)

One of those Indians featured in a Congress
advertisement was a young party activist from Goa, Hasiba Amin. The president of the Goa unit of the
NSUI, she was the face of a Congress ad which said,
‘Kattar Soch Nahi, Yuva
Josh’
(Not Fanaticism, but Youthfulness). A young Muslim leader from the Congress, Hasiba
became the soft target for a slanderous campaign on social media, initiated by Internet Hindus. She
was accused of being involved in a Rs 300 crore scam and having served a jail term. When I checked
with my Goa correspondent, he said the reports were ‘totally bogus’. I felt sorry for
her—no one deserved to be abused in this manner—and rang her and expressed my sympathy.
She thanked me in a tweet. The next thing I knew I was being accused of being a ‘Congress
agent’! In a highly charged election climate, this vitriol was not surprising.

The Hasiba episode, though, raises questions over
the Congress ad strategy. Surely, if the party wanted to showcase its commitment to the youth, it
didn’t need a testimonial from one of its own. It should have gone out and got college
students with no party affiliations to vouch for it. ‘We shot sixty ads with party workers in
different parts
of the country because the party saw it as one way to enthuse
its cadres,’ says an ad executive involved in the campaign.

The Congress campaign was handled by Dentsu. The
agency insists that phase one didn’t go off too badly. ‘We were getting good traction in
January, but then the Rahul interview happened, and everything went downhill from there,’ is
how one of the agency executives described it to me. The leader had been shown up as a political
novice on television—demoralization gradually set in.

Till January, the agency had been dealing mainly
with Jairam Ramesh, Pradeep Kaul (a former adman and friend of the Gandhi family) and Suman Dubey
(journalist and another friend of the Gandhis), with Priyanka Gandhi also, interestingly, being
shown all the creatives. Suddenly, in February, a new face called Manoj Bhargava, an NRI
entrepreneur from the US, landed up. Bhargava had reportedly run a successful energy drink business
in the US and had impressed Rahul with a presentation on brand marketing. ‘The guy started
ordering us around and dropping Rahul Gandhi’s name. He wanted a complete shift in the
strategy,’ I was told by a member of the ad team.

There was complete confusion. Multiple power
centres, typical of the Congress, were emerging. Dentsu threw up its hands; finally, the
party’s media team took up the matter with Sonia. Manoj was packed off back to America.
‘In all the confusion, we lost valuable time. It was a completely unnecessary
distraction,’ admits a Dentsu team member. By the time the agency was ready with its second
phase of the campaign, it was too late.

One big difference between the two campaigns was
that the BJP’s had simple and clear messaging; the Congress campaign was tangled in jargon and
tended to use long-winded words, especially in Hindi. For example, its ads used words like
arajakta
(anarchy),
kaajniti
(work policy) and
sashaktikaran
(empowerment). ‘Who the hell uses such bureaucratic language today? This was the worst form of
language used by Doordarshan in another era!’ is how one advertising professional describes
the Congress campaign’s failure.

There was also a lack of clarity on the
Congress’s target audience.

Suddenly, in March, the
agency was told that the new focus was to be the so-called ‘sandwich class’—not
rich, not middle class, not BPL (abbreviated to NRMB). Rahul’s adviser, Mohan Gopal, had
pointed out that about 700 million Indians, mainly from the unorganized sector, live in this income
group and the party needed to shine a light on this group which had derived maximum benefit from
UPA-II’s policy initiatives. Decoding NRMB may have been an interesting talking point in a
seminar, but how would the image be captured in an election advertising campaign? A new ad line was
coined:
‘Bharat ke Mazboot Haath, Hum Sab Hain Ek Saath.’
(India’s Strong
Hands, We Are All One.) ‘The voter wanted answers to questions of corruption and inflation,
and we were giving them some upbeat stuff—it was never going to work,’ is the candid
admission from Dentsu. Gopal counters, ‘The ad agency just didn’t understand what the
unorganized sector was all about and how to reach out to them.’ Many Congressmen insist that
it was the sheer money power of the BJP that gave them an added edge. ‘The Congress is a poor
party with rich individuals; the BJP in 2014 was a rich party with wealthy individuals,’ is
how Ramesh describes it. A BJP insider insists that the final ad campaign bill was around Rs 385
crore (their opponents insist it was more like Rs 600 crore). The Congress claims to have spent
around Rs 300 crore (‘We didn’t have money left by April,’ is what one party
leader told me).

Yet the money game is only a slice of the story. The
fact is, the BJP played it much smarter. While the Congress ad campaign began as early as January,
the BJP put all its might into the final critical phase just ahead of the voting. They also,
reportedly, managed to squeeze the television channels for better rates. ‘Our plan was to
completely take over the media space in the crucial one week before polling—that’s when
the voter is most influenced,’ is how a BJP leader describes the media plan.

Indeed, it wasn’t as if the ruling alliance
didn’t have money during its period in government. In the three years between 2011 and 2014,
the ruling UPA spent more than Rs 400 crores on its flagship Bharat Nirman programme’s
publicity campaign; and
Rs 187 crore were spent in its last year in office
alone. The final thrust was planned by Tewari, who had become the information and broadcasting
minister in October 2012, perhaps as a reward for his tireless attempts at defending the government
on television as party spokesperson.

When the Bharat Nirman campaign was to be unveiled
in May 2013, Tewari called some of us for a special screening. A slick short film had been prepared
by Pradeep Sarkar, director of the film
Parineeta
and there was a song composed by Rajya
Sabha MP and lyricist Javed Akhtar—
Meelon hum aye hain, meelon hamein jaana hai
(We
have come a long way, we have a long way to go). The film radiated a feel-good factor—happy
farmers, smiling youth, empowered women, along with a list of UPA achievements. ‘So what do
you think?’ asked Tewari, anxiously. I didn’t reply but muttered to myself, ‘India
Shining, Part 2!’

The fact is, for all its claims, the dominant
narrative of the UPA-II government had been set—a weak leadership, corruption scandals, slow
growth and inflation. No amount of glossy advertising was ever going to fundamentally change the
storyline. Credibility was the issue and the UPA had already lost the perception battle. A spotty
past record versus the promise of a shining future—the Congress versus BJP war had already
been settled in the minds of the voters. And no one in the Congress hierarchy had the appetite to
challenge it.

Ramesh later conceded to me, ‘Look, the BJP
had an idea of hope that revolved around an individual, Narendra Modi; we had an idea of inclusion
that was based on issues like right to food. Their idea won. In an election, someone wins and the
other person has to lose—why blame advertising for it?’ Pandey, too, admits, ‘In
the end, every successful ad campaign needs a great product to sell. In Modi, we had a terrific Made
in India product!’

On 16 May, when the results were announced,
Pandey’s team had a small party in Delhi’s Taj Vivanta (formerly Ambassador Hotel) that
is located close to the BJP’s 1, Lodhi Estate war room. Three rooms in the hotel had been
permanently booked for the
advertising executives through the election
period. Now was the time to celebrate. As the drinks flowed, there was a banner put up on the
makeshift bar. It said, quite simply, ‘Abki Baar’!

In early June, a few weeks after the election
verdict, the Mumbai Press Club held a debate on ‘Did the media create the Modi wave?’
The self-introspection was occasioned by a growing belief that the media had acted as cheerleaders
for the cult of Modi. ‘You people have sold out to Modi mania,’ was a criticism I heard
throughout the campaign.

The Centre for Media Studies (CMS) claimed in a
survey of the election coverage of five news channels (three Hindi and two English) that Modi
occupied a little more than a third of the total airtime (33.21 per cent). The next highest was
Kejriwal with just over 10 per cent of the news space, followed by Rahul Gandhi with just 4.33 per
cent. Regional leaders like Mulayam Singh, Mamata, Naveen Patnaik and Jayalalithaa barely registered
on the chart.

In an interview to the media watchdog website, The
Hoot, AAP leader Yogendra Yadav complained that the incessant coverage of Modi did give him an
incremental vote. ‘I would say if the BJP had finished 5 per cent down, they would have lost
around eighty seats. Roughly speaking, this is the effect you can attribute to the media,’ was
his conclusion.

Unlike Yogendra, I am not a numbers man. Nor will I
hold up the CMS figures as indicative of a pro-Modi bias in the media. The fact is, Modi did become
the central figure and the main talking point in this election. The BJP’s great success was in
making the 2014 elections truly presidential, thereby enabling Modi to set the pace and the agenda.
The media was, to that extent, only mirroring a reality that existed in large parts of the country.
He got disproportionate coverage because he was, after all, the newsmaker number one. And
don’t forget, the BJP also did remarkably well in states like Jharkhand and Chattisgarh where
media penetration is much less.

What is true, though, is that
the media, especially television, lost its capacity to seriously interrogate the BJP’s prime
ministerial candidate’s leadership credentials. Modi’s Gujarat model, which he offered
through the election as a symbol of his success, was almost never tested on the ground. Modi said
it, we believed it. As a result, we forgot a cardinal journalistic principle—the truth often
nestles in shades of grey.

While Modi reaped the benefits of the media’s
fascination in this election, we must not forget that the TV camera’s love affair with the
Gandhi family was once perhaps almost as intense. For years, we tended to treat the Gandhi family
with exaggerated deference, almost never seriously questioning their prolonged silence and
unwillingness to open up on contentious issues, be it their relations with Bofors-accused
Quattrocchi, their sources of wealth or their feudal style of decision-making. Sonia Gandhi has been
in politics for almost two decades now—how many times have we really been able to quiz her?
When I interviewed her in 2005, she almost walked out over a question I raised on dynasty politics.
Modi has at least been subject to intense scrutiny for his role in the 2002 riots.

But in 2014, the equation dramatically changed. The
same media that had once been hostile to Modi was now effectively co-opted to his side. His every
virtue was extolled, the criticism was muted. By contrast, the UPA leadership had to contend with an
openly adversarial media from 2009. The Gandhis were subject to searching analysis, and found
wanting. The UPA-II government had no place to hide. Much of the opprobrium was deserved, some of it
was hyped. The CAG said the country had lost Rs 1.76 lakh crore in spectrum allocation; we believed
it, almost uncritically. We screamed ‘scam’ every time the Opposition told us there was
one. Maybe this is an inevitable fallout of a media ecosystem where noise replaces news and
sensation takes over from sense.

Or maybe it’s just the nature of the beast
that is twenty-four-hour news TV which simply gets carried away by the surround sound. Nearly every
rally or public event of Modi got live coverage, in a manner that smacked of the herd mentality
which bedevils
contemporary news TV. One channel would air it, the rest would
quickly follow. We even dropped advertising breaks for a Modi rally. On one particular day, Modi had
four rallies. We had shown two of them live. I suggested that we need not air the third because it
was getting repetitive. Five minutes later, I saw the rally was being telecast. ‘Sir, everyone
is showing it, we should be showing it too,’ was the response in the newsroom. A colleague was
even more direct. ‘Modi is TRP boss!’

Just how far we were willing to play along with the
Modi agenda was reflected in the controversy over the release of the BJP manifesto. The manifesto
release coincided with the first day of polling when parts of the north-east, including Assam, were
voting. The BJP officially insists they did not deliberately target a voting day but that the
manifesto exercise was ‘delayed’ because Modi was unhappy with the lengthy booklet
originally prepared by a team headed by senior leader Murli Manohar Joshi.

Twenty-four hours before the release, there had been
an intense debate amongst news channel heads whether we should be telecasting the manifesto release
live while voting was on, since it might be seen as a violation of the election code. ‘Can you
please check this for us?’ Shazi Zaman, the head of the News Broadcasters Association, asked
me.