By Neeta Lal
With national elections barely 10 weeks away, India's leading political parties have sounded the war cry by unleashing a torrent of megawatt publicity blitzkriegs in an effort to lure voters. And in a marked departure from the past - when modest budgets, tacky public relations exercises and hurriedly floated ad campaigns were de rigueur - this time it is sophistication and mega budgets all the way.
From hiring blue-chip advertising agencies to mounting clever campaigns to leveraging multifarious media - print, TV and the Internet - for promotions, India's political parties are pulling out all the stops to ensure favorable poll results. Advertisement gurus opine that the industry will see a 25% to 30% jump in ad spending by the state and central governments this year. More so because unlike in the past, political ad campaigns will not be limited to the election season but will form a vital connect between politicians and the electorate by keeping them engaged in the long term.
"Because it's a very crucial election, no political party wants to leave any stone unturned to emerge victorious," said political scientist Dr Ramesh Naik. No expense is being spared either to address a wide swathe of voters. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) alliance, for instance, has a US$30 million budget for its publicity campaign, having already unveiled a $40 million "Bharat Nirman" pre-election campaign last year showcasing its achievements in its five-year rule since 2004. At the start of 2009, Congress spent $1 million to tout its multi-million dollar farm-loan waiver scheme.
The right-wing opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) isn't lagging too far behind in the publicity sweepstakes either. It has fleshed out a $70 million drive to highlight its "achievements" and position its prime ministerial candidate - 81-year-old Lal Krishna Advani - as a cult figure. The BJP is projecting Advani as a "messiah of change" a la US President Barack Obama by marketing him as a leader who will "lift India's economic spirits".
Taking a leaf out of Obama's book, Advani's election campaign aims to establish a direct connect with people through popular social networking sites with text, audio and video clips. Online communities, fan clubs and discussion forums are all being created at breakneck speed to convince voters.
Last month, Advani launched two blogs in the space of three days to engage with Indian youth, who make up two-thirds of the country's 1.1 billion people. In fact, an enthusiastic Advani has even launched a separate website for his colleague, V K Malhotra, the BJP's candidate for chief minister in the Delhi assembly election. Incidentally, Malhotra was trounced by Congress candidate Sheila Dixit, who snatched victory for the third time to be crowned New Delhi's chief minister. Undeterred, Malhotra is going ahead with a makeover on social networking websites Facebook and Orkut to open a "new channel of communication with voters".
Ostensibly, the BJP wants to demonstrate to India's youth that the party and its alliance are in "tune with their aspirations and expectations". Not only that, to target India's sizable constituency of Internet users, Advani's team is also hard-selling the senior politico on 2,000 websites, including those of prestigious foreign media like London's Guardian, The New York Times and surprisingly even a raft of Pakistani newspapers and online sites.
These media were selected carefully after extensive research and the BJP is taking no chances this time. In 2004, the party splurged on a whopping $20 million “India Shining” ad campaign which failed miserably. The BJP lost both face and elections that year. Since then, "India Shining" has become a classic example of how not to run a mass-based political campaign.
This time, however, the political ambitions of an emboldened BJP are being fueled by the exponential growth of multiple media outlets, including print, TV, radio, Internet and social networking sites, which it hopes will carry its message better to the electorate. And indeed it just might as India currently boasts some 300-odd TV channels and over 200 newspapers, and hosts the fourth-largest Internet-using population in the world, which is expected to ratchet up to 120 million users this year. All these channels of communication are obviously a great way for the political parties to influence millions of voters.
"So much choice for publicity, however, is a sword that cuts both ways," cautions a Delhi-based political columnist. "While it enables parties to access all constituencies - young, old, urban, rural - it also adds to their expense and labor. But because this is a crucial election, the political parties will not stop at anything."
Indeed they won't. Both the BJP and Congress are not only tapping all types of media to convey their message, they are also hiring the country's top ad agencies to execute their political campaigns. Last month, Congress welcomed aboard not one but two blue-chip ad agencies - JWT Delhi and Crayons - to handle its pan-India account. Both agencies will work in synergy on a campaign strategy to project Congress' achievements. The BJP top brass is similarly culling the best agencies from the raft that made presentations to them, such as Grey Worldwide, Euro RSCG, Lowe Lintas and McCann Erickson.
"There's a vital need to hire more than one agency because all political parties will be using different mediums of communication for which the expertise of different agencies will be required," said a Congress party worker.
While political parties often hire advertising agencies to create election campaigns for them, specialized agencies are hired to take their campaign into the digital or new media space beyond websites - a new trend in these elections. The idea, said Prateek Kartik, an advertising manager with a multinational corporation, is to leverage the Internet and online medium for campaign promotions.
It is a commendable medium, said Kartik, as it allows a user to do an array of things like blog, comment and debate on sociopolitical topics. "Video ads on sites such as Yahoo, Rediff and MSN also help beam various parties' messages across. Plus, popular social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook are running a social marketing optimization campaign which allows a one-on-one channel with the voter which is very effective."
For the Congress government, its "Bharat Nirman" campaign will underscore its achievements, while the BJP will have terrorism, inflation, infrastructure and employment as its four campaign planks. Overall, the BJP's campaign strategy will push for "change". While the party's focus will be entirely on Advani, the successes of regional leaders like Narendra Modi and Raman Singh will also be highlighted, said insiders.
Congress, meanwhile, is playing up the coalition UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, 62, and her son Rahul Gandhi, 38, as agents of "change and development".
While Indian political parties may not yet be able to match Obama's ad spending of $60 million to run over 100,000 political TV ads, they are getting there. And fast and it looks like it won't be long before Indian political parties too will be able to make such gargantuan investments in their campaigns.
In the meantime, as long as these mega budget and multimedia campaigns help connect the electorate with their political leaders by engaging them both in meaningful debate and dialogue, few see any harm in such endeavors.
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