Of Modern Kingmakers: What's The Public Left With?

Me: So I'm writing the next article on Prashant Kishor

Bengali Friend: Interesting

Me: How effective do you think he is?

Bengali Friend: Prashant Kishor can only do so much, gadha ke pitiye ghora kora jayena, you can't train a mule to become a horse

Me: But you can get enough people to believe the donkey is a horse

...

Meanwhile, if you are thinking when did this blog go political, let me clarify.

This article takes a rather interesting and less thought-of approach to policy and the state economy. The effect of who is in power. Rather, the effect of who brings her in power, and also how.

...

For anyone who follows politics, Prashant Kishor should not be a name unheard of. The former first rose to fame when he was attributed to be a major factor for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s epic rise to power at the Center in 2014, playing a leading role in political action group Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG). Having left the BJP fold post that, he founded the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), going from strength to strength, one election at a time.

Prashant Kishor and the I-PAC are leading examples, probably pioneers, of an industry that took seed in India in 2012 and has been reaching (in)glorious heights since then.

Prashant Kishor’s impact on election results has been difficult to quantify, but he has always but once been found standing on the correct side of the victory line. Having started his political consulting stint by working with the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, helping him strategize to hold office for a record third time, and effectively gain a stage to claim a prominent place in the fight for the upcoming, somewhat winnable 2014 general elections, where again, he claimed glory ensuring a landslide victory for Modi.

Since then, breaking out from the BJP scheme of things, he founded his own company I-PAC, and has since worked on a string of state elections, having to face defeat just once as against four wins.

...

Essentially, political consulting firms can be thought of as niche consulting firms, offering a specialized expertise in one single domain - elections. The consulting here is not limited to any single aspect of electioneering. In consulting speak, one might call it what is commonly known as an end-to-end offering.

In simpler terms, hiring a political consulting firm is very similar to hiring a marketing or branding agency.

When you have a product to sell, you might hire a marketing consultant. The latter would come up with a marketing strategy for your product, essentially refining your estimation of the target audience, telling you how to reach them effectively, how to put across a clearer and endearing, rather enticing message to them, offer them a price point they can’t refuse, and then try to maximize or increase your target audience.

During this process, the marketer would need to catch the pulse of the market, what it really wants, and what other problems of the customers exist that they don’t know can be solved by your product. Armed with this knowledge, they give your marketing campaign a narrative that answers all those questions that the market had in mind. This planning might be done months in advance given a specific target time you have in mind for your product launch, which might be due to various external factors.

Now that you have a marketing strategy in place and start publicizing your product before the actual selling starts, in most cases you would have a competitor following the exact same process with an approximately same timeline, with a slightly differentiated product. What do you do when you inevitably lock horns with them?

Now that you are in a marketing war, you go back to your war room and tweak your marketing narratives to counter that of your competition. You might also choose to directly engage with your opponents in a war of words in the quest to come up trumps in the battle for the market’s money.

A political consulting firm operates in pretty much the same manner. Drawing from the marketing analogy, the product here would be the political party, its ideology, or its candidate face. The target audience would be the voter electorate, while the marketing campaign and narrative would be the election campaign and the key issues around which the campaign of that party/candidate revolves.

...

However, there exists an issue deeply entrenched in consulting industry, which is actually quite predictable. The issue of experience, ego and doubts.

Why would a political veteran, with decades worth of experience, would listen to a young professional, who might not even have any prior experience in politics, and in all probability, whose age might be lesser than the years of experience the veteran has?!

The answer to this lies in the value proposition added to the campaign by the consultants. Agreed, they do not have a lot of political experience, but what they lack in experience, they more than compensate for it by way of a scientifically structured and technologically enabled manner of campaign.

The ground work generally starts 12-18 months in advance when the consultants start reorganizing and reinforcing the party cadre to grasp what the citizens of the concerned constituencies are thinking. They do extensive surveys and collect data from the grassroots level, whose data is recorded properly and is conveyed up the hierarchy. This is combined with public opinion data collected from the new paradigms of social media, which is something that most politicians do not completely grasp yet, analyzed through sophisticated technological techniques like sentiment analysis etc. The aim is to cover every alternate persona that a general voter might carry, be it from perspective of profession, income, region, religion or caste.

The data, once in the hands of highly qualified professionals, graduates of premier institutes of India and abroad, is churned and twisted enough to reveal intricacies of public opinion at the time.

The data captured is analyzed at various granularities and from multiple aspects and various electorate analysis models are applied to gauge how favorable the situation is for the preferred candidate in that constituency. Similar data from all constituencies is consolidated, and combined with past election results, gives a picture of what the upcoming election results could look like.

Based on this, the consultants present the main pain points, of both the citizenry and the political campaign, to the party, and a collective decision is made as to what the narrative and key issues along with the main selling points of the marketed candidate/ideology should be. Though the final decision, of course, is in the hands of the party leadership, the propositions put forward by the consultants are quite compelling, and mostly strongly backed by data-based arguments.

Also, just like the marketing strategy of a market leading product would be different from that of the product trying to displace it, the election campaigns of the incumbent and the opposition parties would differ too.

...

You must be thinking if there is enough meat in the game, given the small numbers of elections held, the presence of trusted, huge consultants, and the high barriers to entry?

The main question is, is there enough business opportunity to spawn a complete industry around this? Or will it be limited to just three-four early bird players who have already established trust?

To answer the first question, a common industry practice tells you to never measure the size of the market in absolute number of sales opportunities, but measure it in terms of the Rupee value associated in totality.

To get a perspective on this number, we can do a small, back of the envelope calculation:

1. There are 543 MPs and in excess of 4100 MLAs in India. The EC allows an MP candidate to spend between Rs. 54-70 lakh depending on size of state, and an MLA candidate to spend between Rs. 20-28 lakh for campaigning purposes.

2. Assuming the corresponding national averages to be approximately Rs. 65 lakh and Rs 25 lakh respectively, skewing the average towards the larger limit due to a greater number of candidates present in the larger states.

3. Assuming an average of four candidates contesting elections for a single seat.

4. Multiplying and adding up the numbers, the total money spent once in a cycle of every five years comes out to be in excess of Rs. 5,500 crores. It is worth noting that this estimate does not even include the MLC elections.

There are some caveats to this rather conservative estimate. This only includes the allowed expenditure limit, not the expenses that are not documented or are conducted under the table. Allegedly, MLA candidates down south in states like Andhra Pradesh spend in excess of hundreds of crores on campaigning for their candidature.

Integrated marketing strategies employed by politicians these days are no less than those of hotshot corporates and businesses.

Additionally, this figure does not include other marketing costs that a party incurs centrally, which benefit every candidate from their party in that election. Towards this, there is inevitably a huge marketing spend from the government machinery as well, in the garb of publicizing the governmental public welfare schemes and other projects undertaken during the five-year tenure. These documented bills too run into multiple hundreds of crores from each side, let alone undocumented expenses here as well.

Traditionally, numbers on money spent on and during elections are generally views with a high degree of suspicion, and what meets the commoner’s eye and is recorded with the authroities is usually just the tip of the iceberg.

To put things in perspective, the 2014 elections saw the BJP spending Rs. 714 crore and the incumbent Congress spending Rs 516 crore. In 2019, these figures rose to Rs. 1264 crore and Rs. 820 crore respectively.

But the figures seem to be quite dubious and understated. Case in point, reports of the Congress spending in excess of Rs. 400 crore on the lost elections in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. Alternatively, a report by CMS India on the estimated election spending by the political parties in India for the 2019 general elections puts the number way, way higher at Rs. 12,000 crore, breaking it down into various heads like Voter Directly, Campaign, Logistics, and Formal/ECI.

When there are such big numbers involved, how do you remunerate people who tell you exactly how to spend every rupee with claims of multiple factors of efficiency and pin-point accuracy, backed by data? In grand fashion!

Case in point here being the public information of how the Andhra CM YS Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP spent a total of Rs 85 crore towards election campaigning, and paid an astounding Rs. 37.5 crore to I-PAC towards consulting fees for the almost two-year long election campaign, amounting for almost a third of the total expense! Of all we know, this might be a gross understatement of the actual amount of money received by the I-PAC.

However, Prashant Kishor, or the I-PAC for that matter, have been quoted to say that the political parties do not pay them directly, and they are known to raise funds indirectly. This clearly indicates they might be using names and associations, and we can say with a fair bit of uncertainty that here, even the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” might not be visible to us. Here is a rather extensive analysis of how the I-PAC is funded.

With reports of the I-PAC advising West Bengal incumbent CM Mamata Banerjee, media put to her a question regarding the fees charged by the consultant firm. She said that “if someone wants to work willingly without asking for money, what is the problem? Let him work”. What does this, in conjunction with the above stated facts, indicate, or make more unclear? Let us leave this as an exercise for the reader.

...

“Brilliant marketing products are often required for products that can’t sell on their own”

The above statement, however true, does not predict a definite picture though. There might be a problem with the product, or its information campaign. In Indian politics, both hold true.

If not for vote bank and freebie-based politics, India’s established leaders, across the political spectrum, might not have been as successful and the political scenario we see right not would definitely not have been so.

This clearly establishes the need for a politician to market himself and his political ideology. The campaign can be aimed at reassuring his core base, expanding his core base, countering the opposition, and wooing the swing voter. Region, Caste and Religion have ensured that the core base stick to their favorite politician, but there still exists a 40 - 50% section of the electorate that can be called a swing vote base, meaning it might shift from one party/ideology/issue to another in between successive elections.

...

This gives politicians a huge reason to let professional consultants guide their marketing strategies, more so when colleagues across states have been doing so. The only way of making sure that the opponent does not hire the best, is to hire the best yourself. And given that is exactly what parties across states seem to be doing these days, this brings us to a simple but crucial question.

What kind of influence do political consultants hold over politicians, their manifestoes and promises during campaigning, and their policy when they come in power?

To that end, we dug up a few numbers and found that the poster boy of Indian political consulting, Prashant Kishor, has been involved in three major state by-polls, as many as six state elections, and is gearing up for another three.

We don’t add anything new when we say that politicians can go to great lengths to come to or stay in power, and draining the exchequer is something they’d hardly hesitate doing. But what matters is on what are these resources spent, is the spending sustainable, and more importantly, who exactly is setting the agenda for such spending, does she hold a public office, is it someone who can be held accountable by the public?

Some further number crunching tells us that Prashant Kishor has had a direct influence on elections in states that account for a shade over 60% of India’s population, and just a shade below 59% of India’s GDP.

These are huge numbers, given that he is neither to be held accountable for his actions by the politicians he helped into power, and nor does he hold any public office. In his defense, he is just a “consultant” who “advises” politicians and leaves the final decision to them only.

Given the huge farm loan waivers, education budgets, direct benefits, interest free loan assistances, cheap water and electricity and other freebies promised in the manifestos across the states of Bihar, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi, it can be said with a fair degree of confidence that this would all tie up the financial flexibility that a government would have even before it comes to power, should they chose to work on fulfilling these promises made.

"There's no free lunch" never had more relevance in Indian Politics. With the rise of information accessibility, it would be the right time for Indian voters to rise above freebie politics.

Case in point, reports suggest that up to 65% of the education budget for Andhra Pradesh was tied up already before the government came into power due to the election promises by the YSRCP.

Combine this with added financial pressure due to the usual flurry of schemes hastily announced and implemented by incumbent governments in the run up to the elections, you’ll the incoming government even more tied up than they would expect themselves to be.

...

What does this leave us with?

What we as citizens here need to think is, is this targeted campaigning and extensive data-backed social media marketing of our politicians, mixed with uncertain/unknown sources of finances, the kind of reform we need in our political system?

What is this, if not a gimmick, when consultants like Prashant Kishor are awarded a cabinet-level rank by Bihar CM Nitish Kumar?

And what should citizens like us infer from his equally surprising appointment and ouster from the JD(U), at the vice-president level, given that during this tenure the JD(U) was in alliance with the NDA and he worked with non-alliance partner YSRCP for the General and Assembly elections in 2019?

The voter is the epitome of power in a democracy, but is a single voter really that powerful?

It is said that the political consulting can be a great platform for launching a career in politics. And Prashant Kishor is even believed to have political aspirations, given his continuance of the “Baat Bihar Ki” program even after his ouster from JD(U)?

The nation needs awareness more than anything else right now. That itself will lead to public recourse, questions, and eventually transparency and reform.