On the Modi trail

On the Modi trail: Inside the most audacious prime ministerial campaign ever mounted in India

Uday Mahurkar and Kunal Pradhan  February 14, 2014 | UPDATED 09:19 IST

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The Baramunda ground in Bhubaneswar is normally a barren expanse on the side of a busy artery connecting the south-western fringes of Odisha's capital. On Tuesday, the eleventh day of February, this maidan is under siege from a meticulously created phenomenon that markets Efficiency but implicitly promises Divinity. Something special is about to transpire here in the next few hours. The secret is given away by the tens of thousands who are marching towards it like an inexorable sea of saffron-its colour getting darker as it gathers the flags, scarves and topis that are being handed out along the way. These are not bored villagers ferried by local netas for a day in the big city. They've been drawn out by a Pied Piper. They want to sing, they want to scream. For he is coming to town.

Narendra Modi on campaign trail

 

Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, prime ministerial candidate of BJP, and the most controversial mass leader in modern India, has created a personality cult like few others before him. When he hurls one-liners at his audience at the Vijay Sankalp Samabesh in Bhubaneswar, for example, it sends them into a frenzy that is difficult to encapsulate. Modi could be either: a rockstar giving his fans a beat they can head-bang to, or an evangelist casting a spell on some hysterical congregation. Whichever way you look at it, Modi commands presidential pomp in any city he marches into-from Delhi to Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai to Guwahati. It's still early to say if this attraction will translate into a mandate. But there is little doubt that Modi is running a campaign the likes of which India has never seen before. A campaign where every detail is designed to perfection. Where leaders, workers, volunteers and professionals seamlessly come together, swapping notes like a philharmonic orchestra that plays to packed houses night after heady night. Where the message may still be open to debate, but its delivery has now been perfected to an art form.Ever since Modi was named BJP's prime ministerial candidate last September, his core team and the machinery of the party, which had first seemed disinclined to prop him up, have connected for a common goal with the comforting click of a jack as it plugs into a usb port. His lingering tussles with senior leaders have been pushed to the background as bjp has ceded its experience, its knowhow, and the organisational strength of its state units into Modi's hands. Over the last five months, Candidate Modi has addressed 78 public rallies covering a staggering 45,339 kilometres. His schedule will only get more hectic over the next two months.

A bird's eye view of Modi's campaign reveals a spider's web stretched across several Indian cities: From his political chief of staff Amit Shah who is now installed in Lucknow as BJP's election chief for Uttar Pradesh to the party's IT Cell in Delhi that gives operational and ground support, from independent war rooms in Mumbai, Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad and Delhi to leaders in states who serve as his local ears to the ground. These threads are held together in Gandhinagar by Modi's administrative chief of staff K. Kailashnathan, a 1979-batch IAS officer who has been serving as his chief principal secretary since he retired from the IAS last May. Snowballing as he rolls towards the General Elections, Candidate Modi is now larger than the sum of the BJP's parts. In Tamil Nadu, internal party polls show that 45 per cent want Modi as prime minister but only 15 per cent would vote for BJP. The message from the campaign, therefore, is that votes for the party are not for local candidates but directly for him. Modi dons several hats-development icon, chai wallah, backward class boy-whatever works for whichever sex, caste, class. He wears various motifs-Hindutva leader, agent of change, young at heart-to appeal to myriad social groups. A seller of dreams, Modi has one for everyone he needs.

The Message

The content for Modi's rallies is created by his research team in a war room in western Ahmedabad with inputs from a 250-strong team of the Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) run by effervescent tech whiz Prashant Kishore from a well-appointed office in a tower in Infocity, Gandhinagar. The team includes professionals who have taken sabbaticals from work to help the Modi campaign. Akhil Handa, 28, is the archetype of a typical CAG member-he quit his job as an investment banker in Hong Kong last July to work for Modi, handling ground events and a right-leaning web portal. The impact of the speeches is then multiplied from a new war room in bjp's Ashoka Road headquarters in Delhi that houses the party's ever-growing IT Cell.

Each rally venue has been selected with care, after discussions between Modi's team and a committee headed by former BJP president M. Venkaiah Naidu, to maximise his pan-India impact. His speeches fall into a pattern to best connect with the basest sentiments of his diverse audiences. They begin by reminding his listeners that they are a glorious people by speaking a few lines in their language, then go into the localised problems they are dealing with, sarcastically contrasting their condition with the purported comfort of BJP-ruled states such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and then highlight the ineffectiveness of Congress governments at the Centre over 60 years. This sets the tone for several humorous jibes at his opponents, the promise of a grand future if he is given just 60 months at the helm, and finally conclude with another vociferous invocation of why his listeners should be proud of who they are. "Main Somnath ki bhoomi se Jagannath ki bhoomi mein aaya hoon (I have come from the land of the Somnath to the land of Jagannath)," he said in Bhubaneswar, referring to the Hindu temple in Puri. "Jai Jagannath!" Modi thundered. And the crowd roared back even louder: "Jai Jagannath!"

This message is relayed live on TV channels, using BJP's own video footage that offers favourable angles of the crowds. It is broadcast on the party's YuvaiTv Internet channel, and propagated across social media platforms by the IT Cell from a newly constructed National Digital Operations Cell, or 'N-Doc'. The control room in N-Doc has at its command a volunteer army of nearly 1 million people-none of them party karyakartas, all who had randomly connected with the IT Cell over the last four years across various platforms. These volunteers have now been "enabled", with literature and training, and "activated", by being handed key area-specific responsibilities, to spread the Modi gospel across the length and breadth of India. They collect donations, organise manthans (idea exchange sessions) and Chai pe Charchas (discussions over tea), and help the party create a hitherto-unimaginable database of like-minded individuals in their localities who may be willing to join this unpaid workforce.

N-Doc's primary focus area is 155 urban constituencies, which it Cell head Arvind Gupta describes as "digital seats" that the Modi campaign believes can be won on the strength of the online army. Each of these seats will get a volunteer base of at least 5,000 'Modi-fiers'-or 775,000 trained campaigners armed with badges, ID cards, pamphlets, and "most importantly," says Gupta, "with energy and conviction". Modi, famously a former tea-seller, gave his endorsement to Chai pe Charcha when he connected with 1,000 tea shops across the country from Ahmedabad on February 13.

Modi's personal team of speechwriters primarily consists of two dozen researchers who sit in a small room in western Ahmedabad. They are engineers, academics, and IIM and NID graduates who coordinate with the various other agencies and pass on facts and local information on sheets of paper for Modi to go through as he is flying into his next rally destination. This standard operation procedure was visible before the February 8 Guwahati rally. The research team's sheets were fine-tuned by Kailashnathan and handed to Modi on the flight to Guwahati. Once he had gone through the notes on his new 13-seater campaign jet, Modi gave a post-it slip to his 33-year-old personal assistant Om Prakash Chandel, asking for some additional information. This was then culled out of an extensive Assam database over the course of the four-flight flight by Modi's 69-year-old pro Jagdish Thakkar.

Narendra Modi returns to Gandhinagar from another of his whistles top tours

 

Before they landed, Modi had everything he needed-the main themes of his speech were organised in bullet points in Gujarati, and the supporting facts were organised into easily accessible documents to be handed to him on the lectern Before an estimated 150,000 people, Modi, alluding to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Rajya Sabha nomination from Assam, said if the Prime Minister cannot do anything for the people who've sent him to Parliament, how can he work for the rest of the country.

In Bhubaneswar, Modi's local connect was evidenced by how he openly attacked the Naveen Patnaik government and accused the Chief Minister of frittering away the legacy of his late father Biju Patnaik, who still has resonance in Odisha. "Fourteen years of Naveen babu's rule, and you are still poor, unemployed, short of drinking water. Who will be the most upset at this?" he asked, before answering after a short pause, "Biju Patnaik, wherever he is, will be the unhappiest of all!"

Once bitten

This is not the first time BJP has launched such an ambitious election campaign. Ten years ago, as the coalition led by the party was seeking a second term, it had proclaimed that India was Shining. As its leaders spoke about a general sense of optimism surrounding the Indian economy, they spoke of how salaries were rising, the growth rate was high, the Sensex was booming, and the 2010 Commonwealth Games bid had been won. It was a spunky campaign marshalled by the flamboyant Pramod Mahajan with innovations such as recorded phone calls to a large section of voters by then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Despite predictions of a resounding victory, BJP suffered a defeat. The party later admitted that while it was a good slogan for the times, India Shining ignored several realities of contemporary India.

Once bitten, and twice beaten if one takes 2009 into account, bjp is insisting that the Modi campaign is different from India Shining both in terms of technical innovation and precise targeting. "This is the first pan-Indian, modern election campaign," says a senior leader involved in the planning. "This time we know exactly who we want to get to, and how to reach them."

While Modi spoke in Bhubaneswar, 23-year-old Hitendra Mehta, a member of the IT Cell team, was sitting barely 30 feet away behind a laptop. Connected to the Internet, and getting live footage from the main rally camera (or in cricket coverage parlance, the ball-follow camera), he was relaying the telecast live on YuvaiTV. This feed was simultaneously being edited into small clips for YouTube. The N-Doc team live-tweeted most of Modi's key statements, as did Mehta and his colleague Amit Aniruddha Sahu, also 23, sitting behind a laptop next to him. Photographers from the bjp's volunteer force were constantly giving Sahu sd storage cards for him to tweet the best pictures. In the middle of this frenetic activity, Mehta got a call from the Chief Minister's office in Gujarat, asking for photographs for their own social media push. The rally could also be heard live on mobile phones through an automated number. Though this service is not free, more than one million people have heard Modi's speeches in the last four months.

No volunteer left behind

Along with this push across media that multiplies the impact of a rally, the most crucial activity is being carried out by the IT Cell's ground team, which is busy recruiting other volunteers while a Modi speech is going on. A dozen members from the team, led by 38-year-old volunteer Rajesh Jain, is in Bhubaneswar to distribute pamphlets and cards that bear a single number across India on which supporters are asked to sms, WhatsApp, or leave a missed call. Members from the Cell's Empanelment Team, headed by a 34-year-old banker Nitin Kashyap, then facilitate a call back to every supporter asking how much time they can devote to the Modi4PM campaign. This database is sorted by location so that bjp knows how many people they have at their disposal in every constituency. This data is then passed on to the Engagement Team, headed by 32-year-old financial consultant Sunil Singh, who gets these volunteers trained, sends them campaign material, and plugs them into the existing network of volunteers in their localities. Every volunteer cell reports what it did for the campaign that day.

These innovations mirror American presidential campaigns, where Republican and Democrat campaign offices in small towns are run on the strength of volunteers and interns. The Modi campaign's social media push has been inspired particularly by Barack Obama's 2008 Change You Can Believe In campaign, in which social media-a relatively new animal even in America back then-was leveraged by his band of young supporters to create a wave that handed him a landslide victory.

"Like the Obama campaign, we have in effect opened 5,000 offices in each of the 155 constituencies we are focusing on,"Arvind Gupta says. "BJP has a huge online support. We are now utilising this base through a chain of volunteers working on the one-many-many model." These 'Modifiers' feed into the 'Modi 4 PM' donation fund, the 'Mission 272' campaign and the 'Vote 4 India' gospel, which stresses that every vote cast in the Lok Sabha polls is not for their respective candidates but directly for Modi. "We are tabulating data, now our politicians can create the base," laughs a key N-Doc member. Though they say they would have backed any BJP leader, several volunteers admit that things have become a lot easier because Candidate Modi is eminently sellable despite his chequered past.

This volunteer database is supported by detailed voter profiling done by a Mumbai-based unit led by entrepreneur Rajesh Jain, who also runs the right-leaning portal NitiCentral.

The road ahead

Even as Modi was on his way to Bhubaneswar accompanied by bjp President Rajnath Singh on February 11, his closest political aide Amit Shah was making arrangements for what he describes as the "biggest-ever rally in history" to be held in Lucknow's Ramabai Ambedkar maidan on March 2. Tightening its nuts and bolts from the party headquarters in Delhi, Shah, the in-charge of Uttar Pradesh, whose 80 seats perhaps hold the key to Modi's ambitions, says the Vijay Shankhnaad (Victory Bugle) rally will eclipse any grand public meeting that Mayawati or Mulayam Singh Yadav have ever managed in the state.

Seats have been blocked in 29 Lucknow-bound-trains, and orders have been passed that every booth manager has to ensure at least 100 people participate. The rally is significant because it may be the one in which Modi announces his candidature from a seat in Uttar Pradesh, which will prop him up as the true legatee of Vajpayee, who contested from Lucknow. Insiders suggest the thrust will shift towards battleground states Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the home stretch. This will be supported by fresh products such as the 'Modi aane wala hai' caller tune, an e-commerce donation drive, and an advanced version of participative funding.

At a Rajput women's convention in Gandhinagar

 

The Rahul Gandhi campaign, in comparison, seems tired, confused, and forever trying to play catch-up. His team woke up to social media late in the day, and the thrust of their online effort has been restricted to getting manifesto inputs, while BJP has effectively converted, collected and deployed its legions of online supporters. As UPA 2's performance continues to hang around the Congress's neck like a millstone, the party's self-congratulatory Bharat Nirman advertisements on TV and radio are, at best, no better than BJP's losing India Shining campaign. The party is yet to wake up to the tools critical for modern wave-building.

"We have a long way to go," admits a Congress leader, before offering his mandatory optimism, "but ours is an ideological battle for inclusiveness. We know we can win because secularism is at the heart of the idea of India."

Be that as it may, the coming together of ideas, technology and manpower has ensured that the NaMo mantra is being delivered more effectively than any other political message. His campaign is pushing us into an era of approval ratings, truth meters, and perhaps a presidential-style debate. But it is nigh impossible to second guess India's social realities and its complex caste connections. Whether the high-voltage Modi campaign, the most aggressive in recent history, will have the effect it desires will only be known when a voter finally gets her moment of solitude with an EVM machine.

With Bhavna Vij-Aurora and Kaushik Deka
Follow the writers on Twitter @UdayMahurkar and @_kunal_pradhan
Photographs by Rohit Chawla

Online

July 5, 2013: 

Social Media: Modi is the most followed politician on Twitter and the most liked Indian leader on Facebook. His own social media posts are supported by an online army run by BJP's IT Cell.

May 25, 2013
Digital: All of Modi's speeches are telecast live on the Internet for free on YuvaiTV and can be heard on telephone through a live audio bridge for a nominal fee.

January 19, 2014
My Idea of India: All new volunteers are asked to write what they want Modi to do as prime minister. The notes are used as inputs for his speeches and his manifesto.

January 20, 2014
Caller Tune: Supporters are being pushed to download a new Modi Aane Wala Hai caller tune created specially for the Mission 272 campaign.

Twitter followers 3.38 million
Facebook likes 10.4 million
On the ground

January 20, 2014: Modi 4 PM Donation
Also available online, this drive is making a huge impact on the ground with volunteers setting up canopies in various locations across the country to collect money and spread awareness.

February 12, 2014: Chai Pe Charcha
An informal discussion at random tea shops across India to spread the Modi gospel. Modi himself connected with 1,000 tea shops simultaneously on February 12.

October 1, 2013: Manthan
Idea exchange sessions being organised by volunteers with swing voters in their localities. Attempt is to reach at least 100 new people every day.

December 25, 2013: Merchandising '
Modi caps, Modi scarves, Modi T-shirts, Modi pens, Modi notepads and badge proclaiming that the person wearing it is a 'Modifier' are being sold, and often distributed among supporters.

Source: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/narendra-modi-bjp-prime-ministerial-candidate-campaign-social-media/1/343517.html

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/narendra-modi-bjp-prime-ministerial-candidate-campaign-social-media/1/343517.html