Interview |
Political Scientist Professor Ashwani Kumar speaks to Nistula Hebbar on the role of professional strategists in India’s politics…..
Consultants working with political parties is not a very new phenomenon, why is there a major uproar now and what is the difference?
In the increasingly volatile, populist environment of electoral politics, political consultants have come to represent what German political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller calls “an unheard majority of the people”. Given media hype around his super-human election management skills, the spotlight on the talks of Prashant Kishor joining the Congress party points to the radical shifts in the ideological, leadership and organisational party politics India has witnessed in the era of what political scientists call ‘India’s New Fourth Party System” since 2014. Let’s not forget that Prashant Kishor is no ordinary psephologist or a dull academic data researcher. Like Elon Musk, he is both “a fox and a hedgehog” (aka Isaiah Berlin) — a quintessential disrupter with the uncanny ability to transform the weakly institutionalised casteist, corrupt and dynastic political party system in India. Admittedly, since there is neither Amit Shah nor Nitish Kumar in the Congress party, and plagued by the revolt of unelectable ‘senior leaders’, Prashant Kishor’s rise to power would have been a foregone conclusion. Thus, no prize for guessing why the talks between him and the Congress party failed!
We all know that the conventional political campaigning by legendary back-room boys like M.L. Fotedar, R.K. Dhawan, Ahmad Patel or Kanishka Singh in the Indian National Congress party or master strategists like Pramod Mahajan and Arun Jaitley in BJP have become passe. No single development has altered the workings of electoral democracy in the last decade in India so much as the new generation of what journalist James Harding pejoratively called “Alpha Dogs” _ an enormously influential “Sawyer-Miller Group” of political consultants in the U.S. Don’t forget they not only built an empire of political spin, they also became a political powerhouse, directing democratic revolutions from the Philippines to Chile, steering a dozen Presidents and Prime Ministers into office. Using the latest tools and techniques of survey research, logistics management, data mining and psychographic profiling for augmented symbolic appeals, image manipulation and organising what historian Daniel Boorstin calls ‘pseudo-events’, the new bunch of “Political Persuaders” like Prashant Kishor of I-PAC , Sunil Konugolu of Mindshare Analytics, and lesser known Amit Vij, Saurabh Vyas, Amrish Tyagi, Tushar Panchal, Partha Pratim Das have led to so-called “professionalisation of elections”.
What are the implications for political parties with the rise of consultants and their expanding roles? Is the organisation of the party now redundant?
There is no doubt that rise of new-age political consultants is linked to gradual deinstitutionalisation of party system but it’s also a remarkably powerful depoliticised corporate-style governance response to the emergence of increasing salience of BJP as a ‘system-defining’ electoral machine in India since 2014. Replacing the traditional party politicians from the grassroots responsibility of conducting elections, political consultants or poll strategists have transformed the way voters perceive politicians, and the way parties conduct grassroots political campaigns. The political consulting firms are no longer passive advertisers of campaigns; they are involved in a host of critical organisational and electoral activities including preparing election manifestos, selection of candidates, party worker training, field inputs, managing internal factional conflicts in the party, and also facilitating tracking of implementation of populist welfare programmes. In this process of insulating parties from vagaries of elections and ensuring victory of clients, the political consultants have also acquired extraordinary political powers through marginalising the local cadre leaders, MLAs and MPs. Worse happens when they take over the party organisation as we can see in the case of growing complaints against I-PAC in West Bengal. Campaign consultants have become modern-day Jekyll and Hyde in electoral politics — making critical decisions that lead to election day victories, and also use tactics that ultimately make party organisation redundant, at least as electoral machine for recruiting candidates and contesting elections.
Is there a difference in the way regional and national parties deal with consultants?
Barring the Left parties and the BJP, most political parties in India continue to be weakly institutionalised and often have a defunct party machinery at the local level. As the State elections during the period 1991–2022 have seen a move towards a more competitive Indian party system at the regional and district level, political consultants have become attractive option for both incumbents and challengers. That’s why regional parties like TMC, JD(U), DMK, YSR (Congress Party) and the regional units of the Congress party have gone the whole hog for the new-age consultants. On the contrary, parties like the SP, the RJD, the NCP, the BSP, the BJD with their robust organisational structures continue to rely on their time-tested political aides including local MPs and MLAs who have deep knowledge of constituencies. In short, more than the dynastic and patronage nature of political parties, the federal dynamics of elections in India shape the hierarchies of political market for consultants in India.
Is there an ambiguity with regard to ideological adherence that arises out of this, and how are political parties dealing with it?
With the gradual weakening of ideological appeal of Mandal parties and the emergence of the BJP as a hegemonic force, high-cost, high-powered political consultants pose the biggest ideological challenge to political parties in India. In other words, the rise of political consultants can potentially lead to de-ideologisation of conventional ways of democratic politics. As the traditional ways of mobilising key constituencies of workers, farmers, students and middle classes in general have exhausted, the rise of political consultants in the garb of ‘professionalisation’ of electoral politics can potentially lead to what Daniel Bell called ‘end of ideology’ robbing politics of its transformatory vision and leading to capture of politics by powerful interest groups. Despite the erosion in the ideological texture of party politics, the services of political consultants will continue to be demanded overwhelmingly by the political parties and individual candidates as elections have emerged the only gateway to power in democracies. In a highly unequal polity in which poor and subaltern groups face multiple forms of deprivation to enter the competitive political market, consultant-led politics will become a second-best form of democratic electoral order. Once the political field looks like that it’s much more likely that democracy in general is in danger, because people might get re-elected easily but perhaps not legitimately. In short, it is now clear that new-age political consultants have come to preside over India’s evolution towards a ‘second dominant party’ system” with a “simplistic, non-substantive, non-historical and non-contextual” world of virtual reality of elections!
