'Channels and editors were arm twisted'
Says Aam Aadmi Party leader and political analyst Yogendra Yadav while deconstructing Narendra Modi's"perefectly executed" election campaign
in this revealing interview with PARANJOY GUHA THAKURTA and MOHAMMAD GHAZALI
An academic-turned-politician, Dr Yogendra Yadav is an important ideologue of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). He has also made his mark as an astute analyst of Indian politics. However, his first foray into electoral politics was disastrous: he contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Gurgaon in Haryana and ended up fourth, losing his deposit.
Yadav, by his own description, is "interested in the promise, practice, and prospects of modern politics". A senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi since 2004, he has been actively involved in survey-based studies of Indian elections and the Lokniti network of scholars. He has co-authored Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies (John Hopkins University Press 2011), and other volumes on democracy and electoral politics, besides writing many academic papers and journalistic articles in Hindi and English. Yadav has written school textbooks and has served on several policy advisory bodies. He was awarded the Malcolm Adishesiah Award (2008) for contributing to development studies and was the first recipient of the Global South Solidarity Award (2009) given by the International Political Science Association. Yadav is a former member of the University Grants Commission and the National Advisory Council, appointed by United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.
In a conversation that lasted nearly two hours, Yadav outlined what he thought was unusual and unique about the role of the media in the recently-concluded general elections. The first part of the interview, below, focuses on how the media helped "market" Narendra Modi whereas the Congress was unable to market a "bad product" in the form of Rahul Gandhi.
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (PGT): What were the unique and distinctive aspects of the role of the media in the recently concluded 16th general elections? In what way was the role of the media in these elections different from what it was in the past?
Yogendra Yadav (YY): It has been suggested, somewhat loosely, that the media swung this election. Many analysts, especially critics of Narendra Modi, have suggested that the media was responsible for his victory. I don’t buy this simplistic, and rather extreme, thesis. Even if the country had lacked a fourth estate, the Congress would still have lost this election. The party had a very bad product to sell and the people knew it. With the Congress having lost its moral legitimacy, the Congress-led UPA government appeared weak and directionless. Looking back, the elections tell us that governments that look directionless, that seem weak and immoral, lose at the hustings.
Once you began looking beyond the ruling Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was obviously the next big player around with viability and visibility. It appeared to be a party leading an alliance that could have a go at forming the government. So, to that extent, it is unfair to say that the media swung this election for the winning party. However, if the question is reformulated to ask whether the media contributed significantly to the kind of victory BJP won in this election, the answer has to be "yes". The media contributed significantly to the fact that after 30 years, one party, and a party with a smaller pool of winnable constituencies than the Congress, got a majority on its own.
PGT: The BJP got over 31 per cent of votes, which translated into 282 seats—first-past-the-post, winner takes all. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which it leads, got a little under 40 per cent of the votes—38.5 percent, to be precise—but that translated into 336 seats. As you said at a recent seminar organised by the Foundation for Media Professionals, had these elections been held in 1952, when there was a very small media in India, and not in 2014, the BJP would still have won, the Congress would still have lost. However, the media has had an important role to play in increasing the margin of victory of the BJP, in terms of its vote share. You have been a political scientist and a psephologistfor decades. You know how a relatively small increase in vote share can translate into a large number of seats, depending on how votes are concentrated.
"You can easily credit 4-5 per cent of the BJP’s vote share to the effect of the media and this would mean anything like 80-100 additional Lok Sabha seats."
YY: Absolutely. In that hypothetical case of 1952 that I spoke of, BJP would have been the frontrunner—I am not saying they would have won, but they would have been the frontrunner. In our electoral system, once you cross a certain threshold, every small increase in vote share begins to yield a very rich harvest of seats. The BJP would have touched that threshold on its own, but it managed to cross that threshold by another 5-6 percentage points, where each percentage increase brought them—I guess— about 15-20 seats. My sense is that if the BJP had finished 5 per cent lower in terms of votes, they would have been at least 80 seats down. Roughly speaking, this is the effect that you can attribute to the media.
PGT: So, you take the view that the media may have played a very important role in ensuring that the BJP’s vote share reached 31 per cent plus, instead of hovering around 25-26 per cent?
YY: Yes. All this is very intuitive at the moment. Unlike in the past, I do not work with exact survey evidence, but my sense is that you can easily credit 4-5 per cent of the BJP’s vote share to the effect of the media and this would mean anything like 80-100 additional Lok Sabha seats—which makes all the difference between the verdict as it could have been and the verdict as it was. Basically, it ensured that BJP could draw almost fully from its small pool of winnable constituencies, compared to the Congress.
PGT: What do you mean by a smaller pool?
YY: The number of constituencies where the BJP contested in order to win is much smaller than in the case of the Congress. You would still exclude Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, large chunks of West Bengal and bits of the North East and Jammu and Kashmir from that pool. I used to say that you can almost rule out a majority for the BJP because it would have to draw almost 100 per cent from its potential area. But lo and behold, it has indeed drawn almost 100 per cent from its small pool. That is extraordinary— a spectacular and historic feat, made possible by the media.
PGT: You speak of the Congress having a “bad product” that it was unable to sell. It is interesting that you are analyzing the track record of a party that has been in power for ten years by using marketing jargon. Many people would also argue that the projection of a personality – Narendra Modi -- in these elections as a brand was unique. Do you go along with this view?
YY: In one sense yes, in another sense, no. This is not the first time an Indian election has been personality-centric. The 1971 election was completely personality centric—most of Indira Gandhi’s elections were personality-centred. I would say that Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s personality played a very important role in his success in 1999.
PGT: What about Vishwanath Pratap Singh in 1989?
"Newspapers like Dainik Jagran and television channels like India TV, Zee News and occasionally, even Times Now, played a role wherein it became hard to tell whether what was being put out was journalism or soft propaganda."
YY: Yes, to some extent. And in 1984, it was Rajiv Gandhi. So it is not the first time that personality played a crucial role. However, you are right in the sense that,in 2014, for the first time a personality was produced, packaged and marketed in a way that was extraordinary. I cannot think of anything in the history of Indian elections that comes remotely close to the way in which “brand Modi” was launched and sold successfully. I am using market language because that’s the only way of describing what happened. Those involved in selling the Narendra Modi brand had been selling Coca-Cola and other multinational brands until the other day. This is not unique in the history of the world. All over the world, especially in western democracies, leaders are produced, packaged and sold. This is how Tony Blair came to be the kind of leader that he became. "New Labour" was invented with a good deal of market research, with enormous spin doctoring and a perfectly-executed management strategy. All across Europe and especially in North America, elections are all about advertising, positioning and packaging.
In India, this was not the first time marketing agencies were involved in selling a leader. Rajiv Gandhi used them in 1984. He won that election but I don’t think the advertising campaign did very much for him. This was evident when the same agency ran his campaign in 1989 (and he lost). Advertising agencies have now been used for quite a while but, until this election, they had made a marginal contribution in the making of public images. In India, public images have, by and large, been created by leaders themselves, by their persona, as perceived by the public. For instance, Atal Behari Vajpayee was not a media product. His image was carefully cultivated so as to gloss over many potentially embarrassing facts and highlight many positives. But this was not an image created by a brand manager. By way of contrast, NaMo is an image that has been produced, positioned and packaged by brand managers.
PGT: So it is a commodification of politics, if you like.
YY: Yes, but lest you read a degree of envy (on my part) in an opposition leader, I should begin by acknowledging that Modi’s brand managers did a brilliant job. This was perhaps the most perfectly executed advertisement campaign in the history of Indian politics.
PGT: …and in the world?
YY: I can't say that. I guess Tony Blair’s spin doctors did a great job.
PGT: But here we are talking about a country of 1.2 billion people with an electorate of over 800 million.
"Behind the BJP’s victory was the entire spectrum of the image machine, from the anonymous person who wrote obscenities about Arvind Kejriwal to Swapan Dasgupta’s sophisticated spin doctoring."
YY: Yes, (a country) with multiple languages, different social and cultural segments, where you have to position the advertising campaign. So it’s a gigantic task. Thus, while I am a bitter critic of NarendraModi, I must acknowledge the brilliant manner in which his team conducted their advertising campaign. The contrast with the Congress campaign is obvious. It is not that Congress didn’t have advertising experts to help it. It is not that the Congress was short of money. The difference was in the final output. None of the Congress advertisements conveyed anything—there were good photographs but the advertisements lacked a clear message. All the Congress campaigns were thought out in English and executed in Hindi and the final product was shoddy. I almost wish I could ask them to take my advice on getting their Hindi right. Sometimes, phrases that makes sense in English have no connect once translated into Hindi.
PGT: Would you like to give an example of where you think the language in the Congress advertisements was lacking?
YY: Take the Congress slogan Main Nahi, Hum (Not I, But We). It did not work. Or for that matter, the word sashaktikaran or empowerment. Empowerment has a kind of power in English but sashaktikaran is typical bureaucratic language. It has no resonance whatsoever on the ground. I could easily pick up 5-10 phrases used by the Congress that meant nothing to an ordinary person on the street. So the Congress sold a bad product indifferently, without any energy to back it up. The BJP had a modest product to sell. They sold it brilliantly, and they put in all the resources at their command. I suspect the resources were substantial, even by the standards of the black economy of Indian political parties.
PGT: Surely the corporate sector's contribution to the coffers of the BJP would have been substantial?
YY: I guess so, though I would defer to your wisdom on those questions… It was absolutely clear that here was a political party that was not short of funds. In every phase of the elections, the BJP managed to book the front pages of every single newspaper in the area where elections were taking place. That was an extraordinary amount of money to haves pent. Similarly, during the IPL (Indian Premier League cricket matches), on one day, the party booked the entire advertising space. So, on one particular television channel, the only advertisements you saw were BJP advertisements. What stood out was the intensity and the frequency of the advertisements. It helped that they had a message that was simple, short and made sense. Whether it connected with the product being sold is an entirely different question, the answer to which we will discover over the next five years. They (in the BJP) had done a very careful segmented analysis of different sections of the population they were catering to—driven by surveys -- and they delivered their message through the right medium for the right kind of segment. I would say, though, that advertising was only the more visible part of the grand image machine of the BJP. In order to understand the machine in its entirety, we must recognize that there was something above it and something below it.
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