Harvard Business Review calls Modi's election win a Bollywood blockbuster

A recent piece says Modi's big narrative won over big data-fuelled criticism of demonetisation

 

After PM Narendra Modi took a dig at Harvard University alumni during his election campaign, the university has responded with an insightful critique of demonetisation by looking at it in the context of the BJP’s resounding electoral victory in the recently concluded state elections. The article, titled ‘Early Lessons from India’s Demonetization Experiment’, authored by Bhaskar Chakravorti, was published in Harvard Business Review on March 14. Chakravorti, a public policy professor at Tufts University, was one of the first critics of demonetisation. In a paper published on December 14, 2016, in Harvard Business Review, Chakravorti had called demonetisation a “case study in poor policy and even poorer execution. Unfortunately, it is also the poor that bear the greatest burden.”

In his #latest paper, Chakravorti says: “Four months passed. The country emerged with few obvious scars. Although the impact on corruption remains to be seen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was rewarded with victory in mid-term state-level elections, seen as a referendum on its unprecedented action. Short of any singing, dancing, and costume changes, this sequence could have been taken from Bollywood, a movie industry widely known for its fantastical flights of fancy.”

To his merit, Chakravorti hasn’t just commented on BJP’s electoral victories but also sought to analyse how demonetisation played out on the minds of the Indian voter who gave an overwhelming majority to a party led by Modi. After all, another Harvard luminary Amartya Sen had described Modi’s move as a “complex manifestation of authoritarianism” that “declared all Indians as crooks”.

Chakravorti makes a point that demonetisation hasn’t really helped curb corruption that was one of the prime objectives of declaring 86 per cent of all Indian currency invalid. The article states that Indians with black money found ingenious ways of putting back their money into banks, irrespective of whether it was illegitimate or not. His argument is as follows: Corrupt people don’t generally hold their wealth in cash.

Only 6 per cent of the money detected in tax raids in 2015-16 was cash. Most corrupt people invest in stocks, business, real estate, assets bought in someone else’s name (benami) and jewellery. He concludes, “Public policy for rooting out corruption calls for a systemic approach, with carrots and sticks to motivate cultural, institutional, and behavioural change in the long term. Silver bullets, such as drastic demonetisation, don’t work.”

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Brand Akhilesh Yadav and the American style of campaigning

Apart from our elections, even the campaign machinery has also become more American

 

The 2014 general UP elections 2017  represent a watershed in the Indian electoral history in many ways. For one, it changed forever how campaigns are conducted in the country. The Lok Sabha poll campaign saw the then Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, creating a parallel campaign machinery outside of the party to take his word to the people. His campaign to become the Prime Minister had, in fact, kicked off even before the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) named him its Prime Ministerial candidate.

Citizens for Accountable Governance (led by political strategist Prashant Kishor) helped Modi run a political campaign that could have given any MNC giant a run for its money. Through his 360-degree campaign, Modi reached out to disparate voters using their own communication mediums. What made it stand out was the campaign’s focus on modern technology – social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp were used extensively and effectively to create a cult following for Modi and turn the election into an almost Presidential campaign. The result: Narendra Modi seemed to be the only candidate around.

Lessons from this campaign have been learnt by other political parties as well – some more than the others. Later, similar ways were used in Delhi by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and in Bihar by Nitish Kumar, who built an unlikely alliance with his long-time bête noire Lalu Prasad, took his own message of good governance to the people, and returned to power with a landslide victory. 

In the 2014 campaign, the Samajwadi Party had suffered due to its poor reputation when it came to law and order in Uttar Pradesh. Sensing how political communication had changed, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav also decided to adopt the new paradigm. The process started in 2015, when he first met Gerald J Austin on October 31, 2015. Austin had been leading Democratic Party campaigns in the US for decades and had worked on campaigns for former US Presidents like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The famous campaign strategist told the Economic Times that he couldn’t set up base in India owing to his age (he is 72 now) but could help train political associates and supporters.

Later, six members of Yadav’s team travelled to the University of Akron in Ohio and attended an international fellowship programme for two months that coincided with the US presidential polls in 2016. The team learnt about campaign techniques and also about voter micro-targeting.

Even as his party colleagues were getting trained in the US, Akhilesh Yadav also roped in a Harvard University professor, Steve Jarding, to help the Samajwadi Party design a campaign for the elections in UP that are now underway. This was done in mid-2016. Jarding also served as a campaign manager and political strategist to the Democratic Party in the US. His other clients included Hillary Clinton, Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy and former US Vice-President Al Gore. Brought on board by the UP CM in the capacity of a political consultant, Jarding helped Yadav redesign his party’s social welfare schemes.

Jarding advised Yadav that while his programmes were good, there was some confusion among voters about whose scheme they were – the centre or the state. Jarding and team did a survey across UP and concluded that Akhilesh Yadav’s clean image and connect with the youth offered an opportunity. In the ongoing seven-phase Assembly elections in the state, these aspects form the cornerstone of the Samajwadi Party offering in a presidential-style campaign.

There have been specific minor-campaigns that have been done by the Samajwadi Party to counter any negative perception. One of these involved Akhilesh Yadav projecting that all of UP was his family. This was done to counter the perception that his party was only serving the interests of his clan.

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UP has a water crisis but why are voters indifferent to it?

As parties promise to clean up the Ganga and Yamuna, why is clean water not an electoral issue?

"Yes, Ganga and Yamuna have turned into drains. But no candidate is talking about this, nor is any voter asking,” says Abhishek Srivastava, as he buys a wallet in Agra’s Sadar Bazar. “Why not?” “I don’t know. Voters only echo the points raised by candidates during the campaign.”

Over 140 million people are eligible to vote as UP ELECTIONS 2017 — the land of the Ganga and the Yamuna — gets set to elect a new state government. The ongoing campaign is characterised by bitterness, sarcasm and extravagant promises of laptops to each student. Opinion polls show a tight race between the Bharatiya Janata Party that rules India, the state’s ruling Samajwadi Party which is in alliance with the Congress, and the Bahujan Samaj Party, with around 40% of voters still saying they are undecided. Polling will be in five phases in February and March.

Agra will go to the polls in the first phase on February 11. Looking outside the shop where he is choosing his wallet, Srivastava points to a stagnant open drain with its stink and cloud of mosquitoes, and says, “No one raised the issue of such drains even in the municipality polls. Do you think they will do it in the state assembly polls? No way.”

Sadar Bazar is less than a kilometre from the Taj Mahal, and behind that the Yamuna, which is literally a drain downstream of Delhi — around 200 kilometres to the north — till the Chambal joins the river 200 km further downstream of Agra.

Widespread apathy

Everybody agrees that the poison affects drinking water and irrigation. Still, the apathy is mirrored in town after town of western Uttar Pradesh, all in that fertile belt between the Ganga and the Yamuna.

Gokul Ram, who plies a cycle rickshaw in Hathras, says, “It’s the same everywhere. My village is in eastern Uttar Pradesh, near Sonebhadra. There the ash flying from a power station has made the soil infertile. Here you can’t get any clean water to drink unless you buy a bottle, and we don’t have the money for that. The water in the wells is yellow, and it stinks.”

Has he heard anybody talking about it during the campaign? “No.” Why not? “I don’t know.”

There’s a heartening example of philanthropy in the Khurja town centre. Coordinated by the district administration, there is a place for donating and collecting warm clothes. But within 100 metres, on the road leading to the town’s poorer neighbourhood inhabited mostly by Dalits and Muslims, there’s the omnipresent open garbage dump with wallowing pigs.

Butcher Akhlaq Qureshi has his shop right in front of the dump. “I don’t have clean water even to wash the meat,” he says. “One of the candidates was holding a meeting in our neighbourhood. I asked him if he would provide at least one tap for us. He did promise. Let us see.” | READ MORE....