Million Man Marks

In October 2013, almost six months before the Lok Sabha polls, over 7,000 students from India’s top colleges, most of them from IITs and IIMs across India, were busy participating in a new-age political meet. They called it Manthan (the churn). There were fluorescent lights, dance beats, PowerPoint presentations, pumping bass and even a headlining act (like at any rock music festival) in the form of a speech by then prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi.

Indeed, Manthan, a platform to involve the nation’s college-going population in agenda-setting for the general elections of 2014, hit the bull’s eye when Modi himself agr­eed to address the concluding session in New Delhi’s Thyagaraj Sports Complex. At that stage, Manthan was just four months old. It all started in June 2013 when six young professionals, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, a software engineer and two investment bankers began discussing the impending Lok Sabha polls at a restaurant table. The common refrain that day was the need to create a model for accountable government. The result: Citizens for Accountable Govern­ance (CAG), an organisation helmed by young professionals who desired change and accountability.

By July, Manthan had been launched. Through Manthan, CAG was putting its resources out to help people make an informed political choice for the Lok Sabha elections in 2014. While it invited leaders from many political parties, including AAP’s Yogendra Yadav and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, to address their various sessions, at its concluding session in October in Delhi, the Modi-CAG partnership was firmly established. A CAG founding member told Outlook, “Initially, we were willing to lend an ear to even Rahul Gandhi. After all, he is a youth leader. But when we heard Mr Modi at the Thyagaraj Sports Complex, our minds were made up...he was the one we would support.”

Soon after, Modi chose CAG to be the social mobilisation partner for his pet programme, the Statue of Unity project. CAG was not just supposed to publicise the project for Modi, but even help get donors. Clearly, the project and discussions around it on social media generated considerable news. Led by Prashant Kishor, a 36-year-old ex-UN health specialist, who later became one of Modi’s most trusted strategists, CAG took it upon itself to “take Modi to the dark zones where the party and Modi himself were unknown”.

And that set the stage for Modi’s campaign blitzkrieg. As CAG went about recruiting supporters, researching ideas for Modi’s speeches, giving him feedback, deploying observers at polling booths, sending 400 video vans to villages and posting daily ground reports to state party heads, Modi’s campaign was slowly taking the shape of an onslaught on his opponents. Supple­me­nt­ing this were the chai pe charcha dis­cussions, 3D rallies, 185 Bharat Vijay rallies, marathons, conclaves and social media programmes. Kishor was leading a big team—alumni of foreign universities, IIT and IIM grads who had either taken sabbaticals or resigned from handsomely paying jobs at JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group (to name a few)—to take Modi’s campaign to new heights.

With CAG advocating Modi’s idea of India on Facebook and Twitter, by August it had 60 dedicated professionals and over a lakh volunteers to help him in his campaign. As CAG’s number-crunching talent and managerial skills were being put to good use, other professionals were pitching in too. Abhishek Lodha, MD of the Lodha Group and son of Malabar Hill MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha, was busy generating funds for the campaign online. Hiren Joshi, another long-term associate of Modi, was doing his bit by generating publicity material and literature for the internet. Joshi, who had been an old hand with the Vivekanand Foundation, seamlessly tied Modi’s campaign to his roots in the RSS. After all, he had been in charge of Modi’s personal Twitter and Facebook accounts for long.

Help also came from Rajesh Jain, a digital media entrepreneur best known for Niti Central, a web portal res­­ponsible for creating a space on the Net for the right wing, essentially through blogs and write-ups. Jain was assisted by Kanchan Gupta. An associate at Niti Central told Outlook, “When the campaign started, we were sure that the huge numbers of those described as Internet Hindus needed to be roped in. It was clear from the beginning that we would focus on them.”

Just as Modi had personally chosen CAG to partner in his campaign, he also handpicked another lieutenant, Prasanna Karthick, an ex-KPMG consultant, who was given charge of dir­ecting the party’s National Digital Operations Centre or N-Doc, which helped the party’s IT cell in playing Modi’s speeches live on Yuva TV, an Internet channel. N-Doc worked with an army of over 2,000 call-centre employees and about a lakh volunteers to gauge the mood of the cadre and the voters, passing on information to the party bosses to help formulate campaign material. A senior N-Doc member says, “A lot of people could not have made it to the places where Mod­iji was holding rallies. So it was like delivering Modiji to people’s drawing rooms for their personal, repeated consumption.”

Meanwhile, the BJP’s IT cell, headed by Arvind Gupta, worked relentlessly to keep Modi’s presence alive on the Net while also managing social media pages for senior leaders like Sushma Swaraj. Both the IT cell and N-Doc took charge of running a 360-degree campaign across digital channels, mainly web, mobile, social media, voice and SMS. It also enabled a nationwide toll free number that could be used by BJP supporters to get involved in the campaign by simply sending a text or WhatsApp message or a missed call. Meanwhile, the NamoNumber was launched as an application that registered pledges of support for Modi.

The IT cell was also provided help by Anupam Trivedi, the Dehradun-based head of BJP’s communication cell who focused on monitoring and pushing “written material” on the Net, analysing what critics were saying and providing feedback to party seniors about the prevalent mood of the people. All this even as Modi himself was being advised by Vijay Chadha, a social media specialist from Bangalore, on what needed to be done to ensure greater number of eyeballs. Modi’s social media team also worked overtime to ensure that NRI sympathisers didn’t feel left out.  

Together, Modi supporters believe that half the credit for the stupendous victory of 2014 goes to the digital innovations that crucially tilted opinion in his favour.