PM-BJP: A brand new marketing strategy

Positioning the government as some sort of angel benefactor of long-running schemes financed through direct and indirect taxes must rank as a genius move

In 2018, a year before the Lok Sabha election, a distribution agent for a state-owned cooking gas corporation in a small north India town did the rounds of his customers and sheepishly handed out wooden plaques that listed the key achievements of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He had been instructed to tell his bemused customers that they should display these plaques prominently in their homes.

With the 2024 elections looming, the ruling party has gone a step beyond using the public sector networks as a campaign resource. Starting early, it has emphatically sought to claim direct ownership of the subsidies and benefits the government extends to its citizenry. The one-nation, one-fertiliser policy, due to be launched on October 2, mandates that all fertiliser products must be sold under the “Bharat” brand-name plus a logo that ingeniously translates to PM-BJP (Pradhanmantri Bhartiya Janurvarak Pariyojna). The idea, apparently, is to underline to farmers, a constituency with which the government has not enjoyed the best of relations over the past year, that the BJP regime is footing the bulk of the subsidy for the fertiliser they buy. 

If Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had had her way earlier this week, the PM’s mugshot would be plastered all over ration shops, too, so that the aam aadmi would be fully cognisant of the government largesse involved in keeping them fed. 

Of course, the ruling party has had a head-start in terms of creating associative ownership of public goods with the PM’s pic adorning the bottom of our Covid-19 vaccination certificates. India is probably the only country in the world to affix the head of government’s photo to this document. 

But you have to admire the forward-thinking legerdemain of this early electioneering strategy by the party and its star campaigner, the PM, as the benefactor for the Indian people. It is one thing for a ruling party to take credit for schemes and projects that are perceived to have benefited the people, even if they are financed by taxpayer money. That much is accepted practice in any democratic polity.

But fertiliser, food and fuel subsidies have been around for yonks and cut across regimes, irrespective of ideology (the BJP’s first-term programme of subsidising cooking fuel to poor households was an astute and successful extension of this largesse). Successive populist regimes have steadily raised some or all of these subsidies, often to the despair of market-oriented economists.

Even so, no party in power has sought direct ownership of these expenditures in quite the way the BJP has managed. The roiling public discourse kicked off by the PM between welfare spending (apparently the BJP’s virtuous focus) and freebies (the seemingly egregious practice of all other parties) must be seen as an integral part of this campaign.

Positioning the government and the PM as some sort of angel benefactor of long-running schemes financed mainly by money compulsorily mobilised by the Indian citizenry through direct and indirect taxes must rank as a genius move. Even the Congress, which went about naming with gay abandon many publicly financed properties— roads, stadiums, buildings — after the Nehru-Gandhi family, couldn’t have done better. 

The BJP’s welfarist reputation is being burnished by a sub-liminal campaign on every bag of fertiliser sold and through energetic ground-level marketing. In a political economy in which the government remains an intimidating power player, hapless fertiliser companies, which have spent crores to build their brands all these years, are not in a position to object. And it’s a safe bet that the bulk of Indians are unlikely to comprehend the nature of the ploy anyway. Only some 81 million people out of a population of a billion-plus pay income tax and only a minuscule proposition of those who pay Goods and Services Tax have a dim understanding of what happens with this money. The under-education of the average Indian citizen, thus, offers a great brand-building opportunity for any party smart enough to leverage it. 

The bid to establish a direct connection between ruler and ruled is very much a part of the authoritarian playbook. In Wild Swans, her account of growing up in Mao’s China, writer Jung Chang recalls how school teachers were careful to ensure that students knew that the daily PT and the eye exercises they did at school were specially prescribed by Chairman Mao. Jung Chang remembers feeling overwhelmed with adoration for a leader who seemed so personally concerned for their welfare, eventually joining the Red Brigades during the Cultural Revolution — until her father’s torture opened her eyes to the nature of the regime. In India, we often comfort ourselves with the notion that democracy remains India’ biggest strength against the exercise of untrammelled personal power. But when the ruling party starts appropriating bags of fertiliser for a branding exercise, you do wonder where we’re headed.