Aditi Phadnis: The spirit of the underdog

BACKSTAGE

Anyone who claims they knew in advance the Congress-led alliance would secure such a stunning victory in the 2004 general election can only be guilty of untruth. Jairam Ramesh, the Congress's prototype of a backroom boy, is the first to admit that he certainly didn't expect the size of the victory.

But expectations apart, Ramesh and the other silent engineer of the Congress propaganda war, Salman Khurshid, must be given credit for recognising and working on a strategy that the BJP now concedes it failed to actuate. (At his tea party with reporters who cover the home ministry, L K Advani conceded that the BJP worked on an overall national strategy, failing to factor in local conditions and realities.)

Ramesh's theory was: the 2004 one would not be a single national election, but a series of small elections all over India, which mimicked Assembly elections. So the party needed to synergise closely with its local units to understand the points of propaganda against the BJP.

Keeping this as the single most important driver of strategy, Ramesh started work in January 2004, with low hopes, no money, no one but Khurshid to turn to for ideas and hardly any infrastructure to keep him going.

By then, the Congress' strategy for fighting the elections was running along four tracks: building alliances and making sure they worked, which was handled by Sonia Gandhi, Pranab Mukherjee, Ahmad Patel, Manmohan Singh and other senior leaders; the propaganda track that comprised speeches, ad campaigns, messages and political bookbuilding; the campaign track that involved outreach programmes by senior leaders, principally Sonia Gandhi; and the media campaign that involved leveraging sources of news to carry forward the Congress message.

The brick and mortar of the strategy was ensuring alliances were struck with the right partners. But this also meant percolation of the alliance to the ground level.

"An alliance is not a memorandum of understanding. It has to be explained," said Ramesh. This in turn involved mass contact with both Congress and alliance workers.

Sonia Gandhi turned to campaign (Ramesh finds the Hindi word prachar, more accurate). She had to be accessible. Gandhi travelled 250 km every day, logging in 5,000 km by road. These were not national highways. "It was hard work," he said laconically.

In February, the Congress started the "Disha 2004" campaign to emphasise what India Shining hadn't done for large swathes in the country. Younger people between 28 and 35 were handpicked and sent out. The party, comatose after the 2003 Assembly election defeat, had to be roused. Once the base had been made, Ramesh's work increased. How should the Congress be projected?

The party went into convulsions when they saw that Congress ka haath garib ke saath, had been changed to Congress ka haath aam aadmi ke saath. Ramesh was summoned to the Presence. He explained that garib was too exclusivist. There was a mass of people who needed inclusion in the Congress appeal.

This included the middle-classes that did not see themselves as garib. Rahul and Priyanka backed him. Fighting the government was one thing. Fighting the opposition from within the party was another. Everyone said the BJP's campaign was visible and smart.

But the Congress was nowhere. Not true, says Ramesh. The Congress was giving out 10 to 12 TV ads every day. The media was carpet-bombed with ads, messages and interviews. But not in Delhi. You could find the Congress in Meerut, Shimoga and Kutch.

Ninety per cent of the party's ad spend was in the regional media. Between March 2 and May 10, 66 ads appeared in regional papers every day. Earlier the campaigns were in English. The party decided to conceive the ads in Hindi and translated them into all regional languages.

In January, the party was still diffident. In February, an AC Neilsen-IMRB survey gave the party 134 seats.

This was a turning point, though even after that, Ramesh did not expect more than 140 seats. Ramesh and Khurshid lived out of a suitcase, working in a two-room flat that didn't have a working toilet (they would use the loo at the Claridges). They had no gizmos, no computers, swanky office, cafes... but "it was the spirit of being the underdog that drove us," said Ramesh. And look where it has taken them.