The Game Of Googly

‘Gareebi hatao’, ‘India’s time has come’, ‘India Shining’, ‘Mai nahi, hum’—come poll season, spin doctors march up, coining catchy phrases and rhymes they hope will grab more votes for their clients. The real draw is the money parties throw at these campaign professionals. As an ad executive who worked on the BJP’s ‘India Shining’ campaign puts it, “We are mavericks, soldiers of fortune. Spin-doctoring is about creating an image, and that’s what we’re good at. The money doesn’t hurt the agency either.”

True, too true. But as we’ll see in election 2014, someone always loses—and there’s no proof that a successful campaign translates into victory, though the reverse has come true pretty much every time. Silent Sonia Gandhi beat ‘India Shining’, the BJP’s 2004 campaign, perhaps India’s most vociferous.

Top executives who have worked on campaigns for political parties say these assignments aren’t just demanding, they’re mind-numbing, for politicians are rarely open to suggestions. “They have their own take on what voters think. At times, we show data that contradicts their view—but they don’t agree,” says Prasoon Parijat, who worked on the BJP’s online campaign in 2004 and still works on political campaigns. If a party loses an election, the spin doctor, alas, “is just abandoned”, he says. 

What’s worse, as another executive who worked on political campaigns in 2004 and 2009 says, failure falls like a tonne of bricks on the executive; the agency always gets a second chance. “I had a lot of people yell at me. I got bad mail, even threats,” says this former honcho, no longer in the ad business. He doesn’t even know who was threatening him. “It could have been the party that lost, or it could have been the winner,” he muses. The party this man wrote campaigns for lost, but his slogans went viral anyway. “The campaign was a hit, and both sides ended up feeling upset. That’s what I think happened.”

A third executive says that the excitement of counting “two-rupee and five-rupee notes in secrecy” passes pretty quickly. After that, the hard task begins: making a party present itself honestly, accurately and in a way that would make voters pick them. “Unfortunately, that’s just the thing a party doesn’t want,” he says. In the end, the client never won, and, sure enough, they were “upset”. “I was hurt—for me, it was just another job after all.”