60 GovernanceNow | June 1-15, 2014

Bang for the buck

people politics policy performance
eSpecially
BJPs people-rst approach helped it reap benets of technology real-time information from
ground for better planning, and effective online and door-to-door campaign
Shubhendu Parth
W
ith the euphoria of the
BJPs massive victory
and Narendra Modis
swearing in as 15th
prime minister now almost over, and
the media dissecting all possible data
to near death, I decided to dig deep and
fnd out how BJP actually outdid the
grand old Congress in all aspects. Was
Jairam Ramesh actually right when he
said that BJP had out-funded the Con-
gress? Can increase in campaign spend
transfer into such a large scale man-
date or was there more to it?
Perhaps, Jairam himself had realised
the faw in his earlier comment and
rectifed the same in an interview with
a national daily. Admitting that the BJP
had rewritten the rules of the game he
said: The party (Congress) has to be
proactive in communication, has to
have vastly improved systems of feed-
back, and be adept at gauging the pub-
lic sentiment and mood. Bang on!
So where did Rahul and his team err,
or rather what exactly did they not do?
Experts have repeatedly said that
the election was fought on two planks
one, on the hope that achche din
aane wale hain (good days are about to
come) and two, on the fear factor on
communal lines. However, the difer-
ence did not end here. It was just the
beginning of the approach.
The other important diferentiator
was the early understanding within the
BJP that the key to success was direct-
ly proportionate to the efectiveness
of its communication channel till the
last mile. The party also realised that
for an efective P-2-V (party-to-voter)
outreach programme, it was impera-
tive to strengthen the P-2-P (party-to-
party) communication. Luckily for
the BJP, and unlike its earlier eforts in
2009, the partys desire to efectively
communicate to connect was preceded
by the massive strides in another C
the communication technology.
Here, I would also like to add that the
massive penetration of mobile connec-
tivity and the associated data access
through smartphones also, for the frst
time, opened up the opportunity for a
mass-scale use of social media to con-
nect the dots. It would be important to
mention at this point that the partys
information technology (IT) cell was
set up in 2006 in Maharashtra by Nitin
Gadkari under the mandate from Ra-
jnath Singh, the then president of BJP.
However, it came into being at the na-
tional level in 2007 when Prodyut Bora
was appointed the national convener.
Meanwhile, Vinit Goenka was appoint-
ed the state convener of the Maharash-
tra BJP IT in February 2008. While Pro-
dyut went about automating the party
using open-source software and ad-
vise the party on IT policy issues, Vinit
went on to organise the frst-of-its-kind
live online chat for Gadkari on redif.
com. The same year in April, the party
decided to tap the technology tool in
a big way and expanded the national
IT cell to a seven-member team (today
it has four members: Arvind Gupta
Backroom boys: Arvind Gupta, convener (left) and Vinit Goenka, co-convener (right) of
BJPs national information technology (IT) cell
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as convener and three co-conveners,
Goenka, Sanjeev Singh and Amresh K).
During the frst meeting of the team
at the BJP headquarters in Delhi, one
person who literally framed the agen-
da with his presentation and demo
and helped shape the IT cells mission
was Rajiv Pratap Rudy. As a 34-year-
old newcomer in 1996, he was the frst
election candidate in India to use mod-
ern database management techniques
and survey methodologies to drive his
campaign in the remote rural area of
Chhapra in north Bihar. The politician
with a laptop not just made it to the
Lok Sabha but also created a process
and perfected it over the years. The
process and the form created by him
have since been adopted by his party
and is considered to be among the top
50 election-related processes. He, ac-
cording to people close to him, intends
to apply for a patent of the same.
In the run-up to the 2009 election,
Bora designed and launched the cam-
paign website of LK Advani. It soon be-
came one of Indias most visited web-
sites with an average of three million
page views per month. Bora was also
instrumental in producing BJPs IT vi-
sion document, again a frst for any po-
litical party. Goenka was instrumental
in organising a bloggers meet in April
2009. He also set up high defnition
(HD) video conferencing facilities in 11
districts of Maharashtra for intra-par-
ty meetings. This was also the period
when the BJP frst used Google AdSense
to launch a targeted global online ad-
vertisement campaign.
The BJP lost the election but continued
to strengthen its outreach programmes,
technology-driven processes and the
team, which fnally turned to be one of
the key factors that helped the party in
2014. During this period the party set
up IT cells in 22 states and four union
territories driven by state-level conve-
ners. It also got its IT teams in place
across 350 districts, including in Guja-
rat and Nagpur where the party has IT
persons up to the local body level.
The guiding mantra was simple: the
party had to put in place people, pro-
cess and technology PPT strictly
in that order. And it achieved it. Not
that the Congress was far behind. It
achieved the same too. However, as in
the case of the national e-governance
plan (NeGP) championed by its govern-
ment, the party satraps made the mis-
take of putting the cart before the horse
and completely reversed the order by
following the TPP model or technology,
process and people route. While in the
case of NeGP, the TPP model has led to
creation of under-utilised infrastruc-
ture due to lack of process re-engineer-
ing and people engagement, the Con-
gress canons, during election, failed to
fre when it was needed the most.
While the people frst approach of
BJP was aimed at motivating its ground-
level workers, it was also aimed at hav-
ing the partys eyes and ears exactly
where it mattered to get frst-hand in-
formation from ground. The informa-
tion was used efectively by the cadre
during door-to-door campaigns. The
Congress with its technology-frst ap-
proach failed to get the ground infor-
mation and this disconnect further de-
motivated its grassroots workers.
A senior BJP functionary told me that
the massive work done by the partys
IT cell actually helped national leaders
including Modi to directly get in touch
with the workers up to the block level.
The technology tools, including direct
messages on Twitter and Facebook as
well as through Whatsapp, made sure
that any message conveyed at the na-
tional level reached the party work-
ers at the block level in a maximum
of three-and-a-half minute. The mini-
mum time taken was 19 seconds!
On the P-2-V front, the BJP IT cell
claims that it managed to reach out to
as many as 144 million people across
India. However, what helped the party
on this front was its approach of fve Is:
issues, ideology, internet, intensity and
interaction. While both technology and
non-technology approaches were used
to highlight the issues relating to the
UPA government, the party also high-
lighted and attempted to come clean on
its ideology front. This helped the party
trigger a debate on the communal ques-
tion and enabled it to push its develop-
ment agenda. The party was also able
to use technology to reach out to peo-
ple, including party workers, to create
awareness about the various successes
in BJP-ruled states across India.
All this was achieved through the use
of the third I or the internet. Technol-
ogy was also efectively used by the
party to achieve the fourth I or the in-
tensity of the campaign, which the Con-
gress could not match. The fact that the
BJP punchline caught the fancy of even
children clearly indicates this. The last
I was the willingness to interact with
and listen to party workers as well as
voters. This open interaction channel
helped BJP magnify the noise about
the UPAs failed policies, and raised the
pitch for better days even higher.
Besides internal face-2-face work-
shops, the partys IT cell used business
intelligence tools to data mine and cre-
ate focused campaign and noise points.
It would be interesting to note that the
BJP through its high-tech, social media
driven campaign also managed to di-
lute the impact of the TV news chan-
nels. The one-to-many tool, major-
ity of which continued to push things
that they thought the nation wanted to
know, was completely taken over by
the many-to-many tool of social media.
According to a senior party ofce
bearer, what helped the party was its
strong cadre management system that
was strengthened by the ICT tools. The
war, be it on the battle ground or in the
political arena, is won by those who
are able to understand and predict the
condition of wind better. While BJP
managed to use technology for ana-
lysing and predicting the wind condi-
tion better, playing perfect shot to the
gallery, the countrys oldest party was
completely caught of the guard.
The winner was the public and tech-
nology at large. n
parth@governancenow.com
The use of mobile and
social media tools made
sure messages conveyed at
the national level reached
block level party workers in
three-and-a-half minute. The
minimum time taken was 19
seconds!