Slick marketing has been one of the most notable elements of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) election campaign. This is of a piece with its chosen image as a purposeful party that means business, in every sense of the term. Who can forget the innovations of its 2004 campaigns: the catchy Bijli, Paani, Sadak slogan and personalised voicemail appeal couched in the magisterial tones of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
With prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, the tone and pitch of the marketing effort have been raised several notches to build on his undoubted charisma. Freebies and handouts form no part of his strategy. The approach is far more sophisticated. The pre-campaign Vibrant Gujarat events, with their glitzy, showbiz-style lighting, sound effects and PowerPoint presentations, and Mr Modi's own self-styled designation as "CEO" of Gujarat, set the tone.
To be sure, Mr Modi's hiring of a public relations agency and the fact that his party has approached advertising agency stalwarts to shape the message are neither here nor there; the Congress has been doing the same for years. The notable point about Mr Modi's campaign is that, like Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), he is able to attract legions of ardent volunteers.
The bulk of Mr Modi's volunteer-followers represent the eager, thrusting face of India's newly emergent upper middle class. In short, these are people who have been the biggest gainers from economic liberalisation, however halting and dilatory the trajectory of that process. Most of these volunteers have impressive educational credentials from the world's and India's top-drawer engineering colleges and business schools, fervent believers in Mr Modi's business-friendly message of governance as manifest in the Gujarat Model.
They have become the intellectual foot soldiers of Mr Modi's campaign. Their limited urban (and mostly cyberian) footprint, however, explains why the Gujarat chief minister needs to rely on his RSS alma mater for the grunt work on the ground, as Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay pointed out in these columns on Tuesday.*
It says much for the success of Mr Modi's marketing strategy that two entrepreneurs felt inspired enough to set up an online store to sell Modi-related merchandise. The NaMo Store sells Modi-branded T-shirts, mugs, stationery and the trademark high-collared, half-sleeved shirt in much the same way as sports teams cash in on their star players. It is, according to the "About Us" section, "crafted around the principles and values of the man it stands for, brand NaMo reflects the personality and is inspired by his thoughts".
The website is run by a company called Take India Beyond Merchandising Pvt Ltd, which was registered on August 23 last year. Take India Beyond Merchandising (the irony in the full name must have escaped the founders) has two "active" directors, one of whom is associated with a construction company. They describe NaMo as "a calling card for the largest democracy in the world".
Perhaps the NaMo Store entrepreneurs were inspired by the annual auctions of Modi memorabilia - turbans, swords, and other gifts he receives - run by the Gujarat administration. Since 2001, these auctions have reportedly raised Rs 100 crore and the proceeds go to a special fund for educating girls. But interestingly, beyond assuring the reader that the NaMo Store is "about more than just revenue generation" the purple prose employed by its founders does not explain what and how the proceeds will be spent.
Still, there has been no stopping the marketing innovations from Mr Modi's volunteers. This week, for instance, country-wide NaMo tea stalls, a celebration of Mr Modi's humble tea-vending (therefore, aam aadmi) origins, were augmented in Chennai with NaMo fish-vending vans. Amusingly, these outlets bore huge photographs of the BJP's prime ministerial contender holding up a giant fish like the captain of the Indian cricket team might heft the World Cup. Why should Mr Modi, a staunch vegetarian, be brandishing fish? Apparently, this is meant to be a message of solidarity with Tamil Nadu's fishing community.
Maybe it was an unconscious extension of this marketing momentum that prompted BJP president Rajnath Singh to employ the language of a consumer company executive when he addressed the Muslim community in Delhi on Tuesday. Apologising for (unspecified) past transgressions his party visited on the community, he said, "Try us once. If we don't come up to expectation, don't look at us ever again." Even in the original Hindi, it is hard to escape the impression that Mr Singh made the BJP sound like a brand of packaged soup or washing powder to be sampled.
To be fair, the hordes of former businesspeople, successful and not-so-successful, flocking to the AAP are testimony to the magnetic attraction of the business-oriented approach to politics among the intelligentsia, and the AAP appears to be an ideal secular vehicle to achieve the same ends. The real test, though, is whether people outside the pale of "the India's story," as management consultancies were once prone to describe it, will buy into this approach.
*("RSS faces a different Modi wave", February 25, 2014, Business Standard)
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