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ABSTRACT
Electoral campaigning in India is now effectively multi-modal and inhabits both the virtual and the real sphere. However, tools and techniques of campaigning vary across parties. The two parties that this paper focuses on, the BJP and the AAP, are known for running highly organized campaigns marked by their intensity and voter reach. The paper looks at the specific case of the Delhi assembly elections of 2015 and 2020 to compare strategies and the election campaign of the two parties. The paper argues that while the campaign of both parties was methodical and micro-managed, the selection of electoral issues and customization of the campaign to the addressed audience varied. The parties are comparable in terms of being leader centric, tending towards the personalization of politics, and both conducted professionalized campaigns, yet the political marketing of the element of affect differed. To demonstrate this, the paper firstly draws on literature in the field of political communication to illustrate the role of emotions, or the aspect of affect, in an electoral campaign. Secondly, through a perusal of media reportage and analysis, the paper traces the process by which personalization was manifested and how the narrative of affect came to be framed in the election campaign.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The AAP secured 54.34% of the votes; the BJP won 32.19% and the Indian National Congress got 9.65% votes. See Election Commission of India-State Election, 2015 to the Legislative Assembly of NCT OF Delhi, https://eci.gov.in/files/file/3878-delhi-2015/ (13/04/2021).
2 Similar to the BJP’s Panna Pramukhs, the AAP’s local level volunteers are referred to as ‘Booth Prabharis’ (Booth in-charges). Further as in the case of the BJP, each booth Prabhari creates a WhatsApp group through which party updates regarding party news, activities and issues are disseminated as well as questions and interaction with the 70–100 targeted voters is encouraged.
3 The concept of the Panna Pramukh is said to have been introduced and developed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (R.S.S.) while leveraging its network to campaign for the BJP in the Gujarat legislative assembly elections in the 1990s. During the 2014 national level elections, the party created Panna Prabharis who were to regularly meet around 10–12 families in the constituency. This strategy of dividing the polling booth area into 20 units based on the voter list was unique to the BJP and suggestive of an intense voter engagement strategy.
4 The BJP campaign structure in the 2015 Delhi election becomes clear if one refers to the letter that Satish Upadhyay drafted to be delivered at every voter doorstop. The letter was, ‘[S]ent to persons in charge of the seven Lok Sabha constituencies, who in turn will send it to those in charge of districts. This will then reach the assembly in-charge and from there travel to the hands of the mandal in-charge. He will deliver the letter to every booth in-charge who will hand it over to Panna Pramukhs. These Panna Pramukhs will take the letter to each household in his/her lane and read it to the voters’ (Kaushika Citation2015). In the case of the AAP, apart from local level booth Prabharis, there are ward representatives, assembly constituency level representatives followed by five assembly constituencies being clubbed together to constitute a district. There are 14 such organizational districts in Delhi. There is a vice-president for every Lok Sabha constituency which is roughly 10 assembly constituencies. The vice-president reports to the convenor of the party personal (interview with a member of the party’s national executive on 15 April 2018).
5 In terms of the numbers, the Congress Party is said to have ‘[M]anaged to get only about 44,000 likes on Facebook and just about four thousand followings on Twitter handle @dpcc while its arch rival, the Delhi BJP, flaunted about 15 lakh likes on Facebook and about 44,000 followers on Twitter (@BJPDelhiState).’ The AAP had, ‘44,100 followers on Twitter’ and about ‘6.5 lakh likes’ on Facebook (Parvatiyar Citation2015).
6 The AAP had made its electoral debut in the Delhi assembly elections held in December 2013 and won an impressive 28 seats out of the total of 70 assembly seats. The BJP won 31 seats and was invited to form the government. However, when the BJP declined, the AAP was invited to form the government which it did with outside support of the Congress party which won eight seats. However, after 49 days in office, Arvind Kejriwal resigned, arguing that the other parties were not allowing his government to table the ‘Jan-Lokpal’ bill which would have led to setting up an ombudsman to check corruption.
7 ‘Dil’ and ‘Mann’ may be taken as synonyms here as both mean heart.
8 Kiran Bedi stated in an interview, ‘If the party wins it will be a collective victory, if it loses it is individual, I will take full responsibility … .’ (The Economic Times Citation2015).
9 The other instance was that of the Congress party which won more than 50% votes in the 1980 and 1985 Gujarat state assembly elections. Also typical to this election, when compared to all five elections (three states and two nationals) was the feature that the difference in the vote share of AAP across the seven Lok Sabha constituencies in Delhi was the least at just 5.5%. The BJP’s vote share at 38.5% was about 6 percentage points more than what it secured in the 2015 elections namely 32.3% (Kawoosa and Jha Citation2020).
10 This statement was made by Prashant Puri, co-founder and chief executive of digital marketing agency (Tewari Citation2020).
11 Political leaders and parties have often used expressions of kinship to appeal to the electorate. For a discussion on this see Skoda (Citation2004).
12 In the case of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in which the BJP won all the seven Lok Sabha seats, the two factors that played a decisive role were the high level of satisfaction amongst voters regarding the performance of the NDA government with more than half of the respondents in a survey claiming to have benefitted from the central government schemes and the other factor being the popularity of Narendra Modi. Yet, the same survey also reported that more than one-third of the respondents were in favour of Arvind Kejriwal as the Chief Minister of Delhi and were satisfied with the welfare work done by the Delhi government. What this indicates is that the BJP remains the party of choice at the national level for voters in Delhi while the AAP at the state level (see Mohanty Citation2019).
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Radhika Kumar
Radhika Kumar is Professor in the Department of Political Science, Motilal Nehru College, University of Delhi. Radhika is interested in political economy, political communication and elections in India. She has contributed papers to various edited books and journals including South Asia Research, Asian Ethnicity, Studies in Indian Politics, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Journal of Public Administration and others. She was also the recipient of the ICAS: MP post-doctoral fellowship in 2018.