How to Win an Indian Election: What Political Parties Don’t Want You to Know

by Shivam Shankar Singh

The value of short and memorable messaging can’t be underestimated in politics. Any political strategy that doesn’t account for this is bound to fail. A binder full of facts isn’t memorable, and is definitely not something the average voter would read. Most people don’t have the time or the patience to read conflicting opinions to choose a side; they choose one based on the popular rhetoric that they get to hear consistently. This makes it essential for a party to be the one to frame the dominant rhetoric.

Through years of mismanagement, sections of the voting population had been made accustomed to corruption so that they wouldn’t even consider voting for a candidate who didn’t pay them.

The story of the slogan that swept Tripura like wildfire illustrates an important lesson—that some things just happen in politics without much planning, and their narrative is created much later.

The fact was that this wasn’t the first cross-border surgical strike that India had conducted, but it was one that was branded like no other.39 A bombardment of information through news channels and social media platforms convinced the nation that something truly extraordinary had taken place.

The NaMo App had over 50 lakh downloads on the Android app store by April 201842 and is one of the very few third-party apps available for download on the Jio app store, with the Jio phones already having sold 4 crore units.43 The party is also working on increasing the app’s reach by pre-installing it in phones being distributed through government schemes.

‘If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself,’ and, ‘Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.’

In this way, social media can cause real damage because such messages are forwarded in silos where everyone who gets them is likely to believe the information.

India’s low educational standards, which have been further declining in quality in the past decade, also mean there is little hope that the problem of fake news will go away on its own as people start to disregard the content they receive, even when it supports a narrative they already believe.

Details of the episode have now largely been forgotten, though what remains from the period is the widespread public perception that JNU students are ‘anti-nationals’ and Kumar and his fellow students are enemies of India. This incident was the start of a new kind of propaganda in Indian politics, where news channels, politicians and social media came together to create a perception based on flimsy evidence, and cemented that perception even as a slow-acting judicial system failed to render any opinions on the actual evidence.

the BBC prison study, have come to a vastly different conclusion. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the behaviour of the guards was not a naturally occurring phenomenon because of their position; it was behaviour coached by the experimenters who also served as ‘prison wardens’, with the chief researcher, Professor Zimbardo, taking on the role of the ‘prison superintendent’.

The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our actions are determined by circumstance. Our fallibility is situational. Just as the Gospel promised to absolve us of our sins if we would only believe, the SPE offered a form of redemption tailor-made for a scientific era, and we embraced it.

This new news dissemination model where media outlets run multiple channels with varying degree of biases, allowing their audience to choose the bias they want in their reportage might just be the future of information consumption.

Politics doesn’t just happen through opinions people express and whose side they take, it also happens through what issues they choose to debate and what issues they ignore.

Parties such as the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) have a religion-based identity. The major problem with such parties is that they often have to rely upon a sense of victimhood to keep their voters unified.

Electoral Bonds—It basically legalizes corruption and allows corporates & foreign powers to just buy our political parties. The bonds are anonymous so if a corporate says I’ll give you an electoral bond of 1,000 crore if you pass this specific policy, there will be no prosecution. There just is no way to establish quid pro quo with an anonymous instrument. This also explains how corruption is reduced at the Ministerial level—it isn’t per file/order, it is now like the US—at the policy level.

Why did Congress not build toilets in 70 years? They couldn’t even do something so basic. This argument sounds logical and I believed it too, until I started reading India’s history. When we gained independence in 1947 we were an extremely poor country, we didn’t have the resources for even basic infrastructure and no capital. To counteract this PM Nehru went down the socialist path and created PSU’s. We had no capacity to build steel, so with the help of Russians the Heavy Engineering Corporation (HEC), Ranchi was set up that made machines to make steel in India—without this we would have no steel, and consequently no infrastructure. That was the agenda—basic industries and infra. We had frequent droughts (aakaal), every 2–3 years and a large number of people starved to death. The priority was to feed the people, toilets were a luxury no one cared for. The Green Revolution happened and the food shortages disappeared by the 1990s—now we have a surplus problem. The toilet situation is exactly like people asking 25 years from now why Modi couldn’t make all houses in India air conditioned. That seems like a luxury today, toilets were also a luxury at some point of time. Maybe things could have happened sooner, maybe 10–15 years ago, but nothing happened in 70 years is a horrible lie to peddle.

The polarization—the message of development is gone. BJP’s strategy for the next election is polarization and inciting pseudo nationalism. Modi ji has basically said it himself in speeches—Jinnah; Nehru; Congress leaders didn’t meet Bhagat Singh in jail (fake news from the PM himself!); INC leaders met leaders in Pakistan to defeat Modi in Gujarat; Yogi ji’s speech on how Maharana Pratap was greater than Akbar; JNU students are anti-national they’ll #TukdeTukdeChurChur India—this is all propaganda constructed for a very specific purpose—polarize and win elections—it isn’t the stuff I want to be hearing from my leaders and I refuse to follow anyone who is willing to let the nation burn in riots for political gain.

Indian politics is expensive, for candidates and for political parties, but much before a person can think about contesting elections they need to figure out how they will survive while working in politics. Parties don’t pay their karyakartas, except occasionally providing them some money to spend close to elections. Anyone who is interested in politics has to have some other source of income to sustain themselves.

An article in the Hindustan Times, after quoting party sources and media experts, deduced a figure of about ₹5000 crore (830 million) for just the advertising campaign for the BJP during the general election.2 An Indian think tank, Centre for Media Studies, estimated the total expenditure by all parties in the 2014 general elections to be ₹30,000 crore ($5 billion).

During every election cycle, the Election Commission and the police seize crores in cash and liquor from the state going to polls, yet there are no news stories of the consequences faced by people transporting and distributing these bribes.

‘Our best estimates suggest that fewer than 10 per cent of UP state legislators elected in 1984 were the subject of ongoing criminal cases. That proportion has skyrocketed to 45 per cent in the last election in 2012.’

A slow judicial process where cases don’t progress for decades has ensured that India can’t enact a law preventing people being investigated for serious offences from contesting elections. Any incumbent government could just eliminate the opposition with the registration of fake cases that will prevent people from contesting elections for years if such a law was enacted.

If the nation’s education, healthcare, water and electricity reached people, law and order prevailed, and they had opportunities for employment, they would be a lot less likely to elect local strongmen.

While the poor do not have the money to ‘purchase’ public services that are their right, they have a vote that the politician wants. The politician does a little bit to make life a little more tolerable for his poor constituents—a government job here, an FIR registered there, a land right honoured somewhere else. For this, he gets the gratitude of his voters, and more important, their vote . . . perhaps the system tolerates corruption because the street-smart politician is better at making the wheels of the bureaucracy creak, however slowly, in favour of his constituents. And such a system is self-sustaining.

In the pre-economic liberalization era, the government ran a Soviet-style system of quotas that came to be known as the Licence Raj. Under this system, which lasted until 1991, the government determined what a private business could produce, how much it could produce, and even the prices at which the goods could be sold.33 To prosper in this system, a businessman had to compulsorily depend on favours from bureaucrats and politicians to get permissions for higher quotas, higher prices or to enter new domains. The low wages of government employees at the time ensured that corruption was rampant.

Ultimately, Irom Sharmila, a woman who had fasted for sixteen years for people’s rights, received a total of ninety votes from the people of her state.5 Another candidate of the party, a Muslim woman named Najima Bibi, who had fought court cases for the rights of over a thousand women of her locality and ran a shelter home for the victims of domestic violence and destitute women, received just thirty-three votes.

Voters want their vote to matter, and so they want to vote for a party that has a reasonable chance of winning. With their much smaller footprint and visibility, new parties just aren’t able to create the perception that they have a reasonable chance of winning, and that prevents them from getting votes from even those who might believe in them.