 "Congress MP Deepender Hooda on his way to violence-hit areas of Nuh,")
Railway Road in Rohtak is one of the oldest retail markets in the city. One early evening, even in this unprecedented heatwave, this market has enough people thronging the shops on both sides, as if it were any regular day. A walk down this road, however, doesn’t have any signs of a major election taking place. On Saturday, May 25, 2024, Rohtak (and the rest of Haryana) will vote in the sixth phase of Lok Sabha Elections 2024.
The city of Rohtak in Haryana is often referred to as the state’s real “political capital”, even as Chandigarh exists. Rohtak, the Lok Sabha constituency, has two sitting members of Parliament (MPs) battling it out this time. The incumbent LS MP Arvind Sharma of the BJP is facing off against Rajya Sabha MP Deepender Singh Hooda. Hooda has previously represented Rohtak thrice in the Indian Parliament. Given the high stakes, it ought to be absolute bedlam out there on the streets. It is anything but.
It is a similar story in Beri, just 30 minutes outside of Rohtak. Beri is one of the nine Assembly segments that form the Rohtak Lok Sabha constituency. In this rural constituency, there are no posters, no pamphlets scattered anywhere, no hoardings, or even rickshaws blaring appeals for votes on loudspeakers. Given how conspicuous ‘prachar samagri’ (publicity material) is by its absence, you may be led to believe this to be an election without voter engagement or expenditure on publicity. You would be wrong. The voters are engaged, and the expenditure is happening, but instead of candidates spending on posters, pamphlets, hoardings and buntings, money seems to be flowing to Meta and Alphabet.
The state of campaigning in Rohtak isn’t too different from the campaigning in Karnataka. Gururaj (name changed) handled the election campaign for a Congress candidate for the Lok Sabha constituency in the Vokkaliga-dominated seat of Mysuru, Karnataka. “We have shifted the campaigning to digital,” he said in the first week of April 2024. This region voted on April 26, in the second phase.
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“We had data for 1.2 million voters who are beneficiaries of some or the other government scheme. After deduping, the real number came down to 975,000, out of which about 610,000 were on WhatsApp (WA) too,” said Gururaj.
But why shift the campaigning to a primarily digital mode? Blame the weather gods, says Gururaj. This year the Mysuru-Bengaluru region had an unusually hot April, with no signs of rain for most parts. With voters not really venturing out in this hot weather and preferring the safety of their homes, candidates moved the campaign to smartphones.
A month later, Rohtak is right in the middle of an intense, unrelenting heatwave, too. Ashish (name changed) has been working on the INC campaign in Rohtak and his words seem to echo Gururaj’s in Mysuru.
But what are the contours of a digital campaign? Think YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and direct contact on your phone. The electoral industry now comprises enough vendors who specialise in providing such services to anxious candidates and political parties.
“We decided on a three-week campaign. In the first week, we would call the 975,000 numbers once daily with a custom political message using an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) service. We would also send one WhatsApp video message to the 610,000 WA numbers daily. It was a video message (maximum size 5 Mb and 200 characters of text to go with it). We had specialised vendors to deliver these services,” Gururaj explains. A similar story plays out in Rohtak.
Vendors would quote a per call (in case of IVR) or a per message (in case of WA) cost to the candidate. A 30-second IVR call could cost anywhere between 12 and 28 paise. Money becomes due only if the call is picked. In case of WA the cost of delivering the message could be anywhere between 7 and 30 paise per message. This is just for delivering the message. In Mysuru, a hired voiceover artist would record a custom political message daily, which would be transmitted using one of the vendors.
Digital campaigning suits both voters and candidates. The voters consume the messages sitting in the comfort of their homes, and for the candidates, it helps that this expense isn’t factored into their total electoral spend. The Election Commission doesn’t have the means to track who is sending the general political messages on WhatsApp.
Another major change one can observe in Haryana in these elections is how Congress candidates try to sell their association with former party president, Rahul Gandhi. This is vastly different from a decade ago. In the 2014 Assembly elections, the party candidates would rather not have the Gandhis visit their ‘halka’ (constituency). After a prolonged Lokpal campaign against allegations of large-scale corruption against the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, the Gandhi surname seemed to be radioactive. It didn’t help that Rahul Gandhi wasn’t seen as a serious politician. In 2024, candidates try to buttress their case among the voters by selling their proximity to Rahul Gandhi.
Gururaj echoes a similar sentiment in Karnataka. He credits the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ for bringing this change in how voters perceive Rahul Gandhi. Having worked on strategy for the 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign for the Congress party based out of New Delhi, Gururaj is well placed to explain this change.
After 2014, when I informed people that I had worked with him earlier, they would ask me questions like “What is he like? Is he a serious politician? Is he even interested in this? They would scoff when I said he was a well-read, intelligent politician.”
“Over 10 years, between 2014 and 2024, especially in Karnataka, the feeling has changed from derisive curiosity to acceptance and appreciation. Unlike 2014, the Gandhi family is not stigma anymore,” he says.
