INSIDE THE WAR ROOM

‘The Word ‘right’ should be excluded from political language, as the word ‘cause’ from the language of philosophy’ —Auguste Comte

Efforts to create a Modi wave, or a Modi tsunami, had begun many months before the 2014 polls, in right earnest, in various pockets of India where ordinary citizens unaffiliated to political parties got together to create awareness about their choice of candidate. It helped that most of these self-motivated people were pro-Modi. It further helped that the BJP caught on early to the favourable tendencies of these people and began to cooperate with them to spread the ‘M’ word.

Inside a government office on Gandhinagar’s Infocity campus where a group of young, highly educated graduates from some of India’s most reputed institutes was working 24×7 for the nation’s cause, I spoke to four of them who had quit high-paying jobs to support the 2014 election campaign. They were glad they were part of the making of history— even a cynic would have been inspired to hear them speak.

Former Credit Suisse executive Rishi Raj Singh had spent several tough weeks in Uttar Pradesh during the campaign. Born in Kanpur, UP, this affable young man is a chemical engineering graduate of the 2011 batch from IIT Kanpur. Agra-born Gaurav Bhatele, a natural leader capable of long silences and short spells of quick, intelligent chat, is a BTech in aerospace engineering and a former associate with Boston Consulting Group. Like Singh, he, too, passed out of IIT Kanpur the same year. So did the effusive Piyush Jalan, born in Varanasi, a former business analyst at Deloitte Consulting and a BTech in biological sciences and bio- engineering. The superbly confident and creative Nandan Jha, seated towards my left, is two years younger than the rest: a native of Dharbanga, Bihar, he graduated from IIT Bombay in 2013.

“We were not very happy with what we were doing in our corporate jobs. We wanted to do something more. So we came together,” starts off Bhatele, who—along with his friends— is a member of what has now attained a cult status among election managers, a group named Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG). It is a not-for-profit NGO launched by Modi’s Man Friday and former UN health official, 35-year-old Prashant Kishor. Any resemblance to the other CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India), the feared internal auditor of the country—which had over the past several years put the government on its toes over several decisions, especially with regard to allocation of air waves and natural resources that it argued resulted in losses amounting to trillions of rupees— is accidental.

Or, considering how the ‘Modi wave’ took shape, perhaps not.

The world over, frustration among the youth has given birth to various movements, and in free India we have seen young graduates and students adding glamour and gravitas to the Naxalbari movement of the late 1960s, the Poorna Swaraj movement led by the redoubtable Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970s, and even the Ram temple movement that saw the rise of the BJP as a formidable electoral force. In recent times, student angst and youth anger have eventually gone astray, be it in the Arab world or elsewhere. The Arab Spring—the wave of revolutions that deposed rulers from Egypt to Sudan and continues to lead to violent protests across the Middle East from Syria to Israel, Western, Sahara to Palestine and beyond—was one such manifestation of what motivated young men and women could do. In countries such as Greece, which are battling serious economic crises, despair, anger and, sometimes, wounded pride have pushed many young people to throw their lot behind far- Right political outfits such as Golden Dawn, which is fiercely anti-Semitic and popular. In France you have greater support from young people now for the far-Right National Front led by Marie Le Pen than ever before. Nationalist parties across Europe, from Denmark to UK and Austria, have also gained ground lately.

At CAG, around the time of pre-elections in 2013-14, angry educated Indian youth found a rather more productive outlet.

When they first came together in the summer of 2013, their motley group wasn’t yet CAG and they had no inkling that they would run key parts of the Modi campaign. They just wanted to do something very different from their drab corporate work and to help drive growth and development in the country. By the time CAG was formed in mid-2013 out of a group that swelled from ten to thirty to fifty and now 150 permanent members, these young people were busy organising outreach programmes for the youth and first-time entrepreneurs. Their first major event was a ‘young India’ conference held in June 2013 where they invited some fifty business leaders to discuss their vision for India for the year 2020. Former President Abdul Kalam attended the meet. Narendra Modi also turned up.

Many of them were first-time voters. Their watershed moment—following some unexpected turns of events that meant these young men and women with hardly any experience in political campaigns would become part of the largest democratic experiment ever in modern history— was yet to come.

The second event they organised—this time as CAG—was Manthan, in September 2013. The aim of this project was to involve the youth of the country in shaping the agenda of Election 2014. Online participants were asked to provide solutions to fourteen key challenges the country faced in various spheres of life—education, health, livelihood, urban planning and so on. More than 20,000 entries came in from 700 different colleges across 300 cities, says a CAG member. During this campaign, the outreach team of CAG—they had 500 campus ambassadors by then—visited different colleges and told them that the whole competition was meant for connecting the youth with the nation’s decision-makers. Shortlisted teams— those who gave the best solutions to some of the vexing problems plaguing India— got a chance to attend the finale at Thyagaraj Stadium, New Delhi, on 2 October 2013, Mahatma Gandhi’s 144th birth anniversary. The winners of the competition also got a chance to intern with renowned policymakers from domains such as politics, business and social services. They would further get an opportunity to present their recommendations before leaders from the BJP and the Congress. In all, around five lakh people participated in the entire activity. CAG’s website would get over two lakh visitors a day around then.

Manthan gave what the CAG later discovered was a clear edge after it joined Modi’s campaign team: a bankable network among a phenomenally large—and fast-growing—group of educated, aspiring young people across the country. During Manthan, CAG conducted a voting among the core team and its associates to assess the country’s most popular leader: it was Modi. That was in October 2013. “So we said okay, let’s go and support Modi in this election,” says Bhatele.

That, in hindsight, was a foregone conclusion.

The reason being that Prashant Kishor, who was befriended by Modi in London when the latter was on a visit to the British capital, before he started working for the Gujarat chief minister in 2011, had sought out these young people and built team CAG with the purpose of creating a backbone for the Modi campaign of 2014. The 35-year-old’s aim, after having learnt lessons from the state assembly elections in Gujarat in 2012, was to set up a team that could replace whom he derogatively refers to as ‘vendors’— consultants, event managers and their ilk—with an in-house team of committed pros and volunteers who worked in tandem with the BJP leadership. “I firmly believe that to do a presidential campaign, you need your own resources to conceptualise, plan and implement in a preferred manner—you can’t rely on outside vendors to do it for you,” he told me, stressing that hiring multiple outside agencies for planning and execution of a political party’s campaign often proved disastrous and cumbersome. “Which is why I created CAG,” he said. With the success of Manthan, Kishor had a potent youth force that was functional, independent of the BJP and readily swelling. And at the core of the not-for-profit organisation, which first gathered informally in the first week of May 2013 registered under Section 25 of the Companies Act, were graduates from IIM, IIT, Indian School of Business, Stanford, Cornell and so on, who had earlier worked at firms such as AT Kearney, JP Morgan, Michelin India, IBM, Barclays Capital, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, McKinsey and Company, and Goldman Sachs. They were zealously ready to go for the kill.

Kishor had no doubts whatsoever: it was going to be a presidential-style campaign and that called for selling Modi as aggressively and fiercely as a brand to as many people as possible in a short time, thrust in their minds the image of a no- nonsense leader who could lift the country out of a decade of lethargy, misgovernance and apathy. CAG was ready to go to any extent to do it. Truth didn’t matter, hype shall reign.

At the height of the election campaign, Kishor had 400- 500 members and ninety-five lakh volunteers working for him at CAG.

Coming after the Chai pe Charcha blitzkrieg—which helped created the impression of Modi being a citizen politician battle- ready to take on governance odds and to highlight social and political issues—the 3D hologram campaign was yet another major coup. It had been tried out earlier in the 2012 Gujarat assembly elections.

The idea came from cinematographer UK Senthil Kumar after his chance meeting with the Gujarat chief minister before the 2012 polls. The 3D hologram campaign involved shooting Modi’s speech using 3D holographic technology to enable millions of people to see and hear him from multiple locations. Typically used by rock stars and celebrities in their performances, this technology had never been tried by politicians in India before. Modi, a technology freak, was instantly impressed by the hologram technology and allowed Senthil Kumar, trained in holographic technology in London, to try it out.

The 3D hologram campaign, or 3D rallies, showed Modi appearing out of the blue, in thin air, and speaking to common people. In the Indian countryside as well as cities, this novel concept set in motion talk about Modi long after the rally ended—elevating him from mere mortal to someone with more extraordinary abilities, especially to the uneducated mind. In the assembly elections of 2012, before Modi began his speech in a typical 3D rally, an invisible moderator introduced the people of the state in Gujarati and English to the idea of public addresses using “3D holographic volumetric projection technology”. She argued that through the use of such technology in elections, Gujarat had set a new trend for the world to uphold along the lines of the Gujarat development model. Modi’s 3D avatar would then appear on stage in a flashy setting. He would begin his speech following a few minutes of songs that kicked up regional pride. “Bharat Mata Ki… Bharat Mata Ki,” he thundered before launching into his usual rousing delivery.

“It was a, major plus to our campaign. In areas where we didn’t have much organisational strength and where there was a lot of infighting among our workers, this 3D campaign breathed a new life,” BJP leader Laxmikant Bajpai told me before the polls. Modi, in fact, had attracted a lot of criticism over the use of holograms in the national poll race. Opposition parties had asked the Election Commission to probe the source of funding for the highly expensive hi-tech 3D extravaganza. Congress leaders charged that Rs 5 crore had been spent for each 3D projection that helped Modi speak to voters in rural hamlets normally by-passed by the election process, giving the BJP anvedge that other parties could not afford. They argued that all the ‘imaginative’ techniques used by BJP were nothing more than the ostentatious display of corporate wealth. BJP, of course, denied all accusations.

Modi’s 3D rallies were held in 1,300 locations across India, the first being held on 11 April 2014 and the last on 9 May. Holograms were ten feet tall and their deployment required use of shipping containers, trucks, buses and close to 4,000 workers. Four workers died in road accidents as the Modi election machinery unfurled logistical and technological operations unprecedented in Indian politics.

The CAG team boasts that they created a world record of sorts by holding such events in 150 locations simultaneously on a single day. These rallies created frenzy in many parts of the country where people thronged to take in Modi appearing as if in an epiphany. “It was technology, but people thought there was more to it than technology. If it was just technology then why weren’t Rahul or Sonia or Mulayam Singh Yadav appearing out of the blue? people asked. The 3D rallies were therefore a major fillip to our campaign,” argues Bajpai. It was, in fact, yet another gigantic vessel of the campaign fleet that, besides capturing people’s imagination of Modi being a dogged pursuer, contributed to shaping the idea of a technologically ingenious man who could be the next prime minister of India.

It was a massive exercise indeed, one India has never seen before. And managing the logistics was a painstaking effort. Organising a 3D rally involved multiple vendors, right from the team that set up the stage to the one that handled satellite connection. Equipment needed to be carried around in trucks that would also house the hologram projector. Coordinating with the projector operator across destinations was an uphill task. He needed assistance from a UPS operator and often a logistics guy to ensure smooth functioning of all equipment. Towards the end of the campaign—which also involved getting permissions, mobilising party cadres and managing everything centrally—there were 150 trucks on the road. Compared with the Gujarat elections, the campaign team tripled the number of 3D rallies it organised on a day from an average of fifty to 150 in the national elections.

“We had made a checklist of every 3D location—and three days in advance, we had to assess the viability, feasibility and suitability of holding a 3D rally at a particular place, similar to the Chai pe Charcha campaign. But the problem here was far more complex because the technology itself was very cumbersome, besides the frequency of running the campaign every alternate day for almost a month,” another CAG executive told me.

Poll managers had to factor in all likely hindrances from lack of road connectivity to bad weather. For instance, on 14 April 2014, a storm kicked up in Uttar Pradesh, just three hours before the programme was to start. “As soon as we saw it in Lucknow, we called our people and said, ‘Boss, get everything down, let the storm pass’. But we also had our plan B ready. So we called up a few people and we had these cranes come in. These actually picked up the trucks on which the projector was fixed, and at the very last moment, we had eleven locations live out of the twelve that were otherwise completely devastated in the storm.” The point he makes is that the team had to stretch themselves a lot more than they had bargained for. “We had to be on our guard all the time,” explains a CAG member, adding that attendance at these rallies in Uttar Pradesh could go up to 15,000-20,000 people per event.

The most valuable part of this campaign was that it got covered extensively in the media. The sheer novelty factor drew in TV channels and print journalists who often reported back breathlessly on the goings-on at the events, further gripping the imaginations of lakhs of television viewers and newspaper readers across the country. Television footage of 3D rallies relayed Modi speaking on a variety of subjects, often unsheathing his biting criticism of Congress leaders, especially Rahul Gandhi whom he invariably referred to as the “prince”

A large part of BJP’s hype-creating machinery was dependent on the massive amounts of data they managed to collect, sort and digitise. Though Jain’s team had compiled a list of eighty- one lakh voters and connected many mobile phone numbers with voter IDs, it was the CAG team that ruled the data-collecting game, down to nearly six lakh booths across the country.

CAG’s data-analytics team helped BJP in two major ways. One, they managed to collect booth-wise performance of political parties over the past eight elections—including the state and national polls. Two, they were able to segregate each and every constituency based on its prospects for the BJP—which was of great use for the RSS, a leader of the organisation told me, emphasising that it made RSS and the BJP sit up about their performance in several constituencies. “We had not done that badly after all. We do have a chance this time around, especially in many seats of Uttar Pradesh,” he said at the time of the elections. Similar data collection was attempted by others, too, but it was the one CAG compiled that the RSS found useful.

The CAG analytics team digitised the election results with a clear-cut plan, says a member. “It was done to remove biases of previous elections. Every seat in India was slotted into one of four categories based on their probabilities to win, or their current status. The categories were: safe (BJP seat assured), favourable (tending towards the BJP, yet it could swing the other way too), battleground (where it is a neck-and-neck fight), and difficult (traditional rival seat),” explains a CAG member. Interestingly, Varanasi fell in the ‘favourable’ zone, and not ‘safe’ because calculations were based on retrospective data. “After all, this election was very different from the usual: it was a wave,” he adds.

This kind of data-crunching also meant that the BJP and the RSS got invaluable data at the village level. “The booth-wise picture helped us plan accordingly—where did we need to recruit more people for door-to-door canvassing? Where did we need to assign special squads to track the work of the rivals and counter them? Everything suddenly became very scientific. Earlier, we based our planning on mental calculations. This time, we had data on our fingertips, literally, on a sheet of paper,” says a senior RSS leader from Lucknow.

The logic behind the CAG analytics can be explained this way: suppose you have 1,000 resources, what is the best way to distribute them among the districts? If it’s a safe seat, there’s no point in Modi visiting twice or thrice for canvassing votes. This information was put to best use during the Bharat Vijay rallies —on-ground grand events where Modi tore into the Congress— where locations were mostly chosen through CAG’s categorisation. “It helped tremendously in suggesting which spots to hit and which ones to miss,” says a Modi team member. Though it was BJP and not CAG that took the final call on deciding rally venues, CAG’s data helped in choosing seats that needed the attention of topnotch campaigners.

Beginning 26 March 2014, Modi addressed 196 Bharat Vijay rallies across 295 Lok Sabha constituencies during the elections —all of them identified by CAG as crucial—and about 450 in the run-up to the state elections that preceded the Lok Sabha elections. Team Modi also paid attention to multiple nearby locations in the zone of ‘battleground’ seats to usher in a spillover effect while scheduling Modi’s visits. A CAG member told me that they followed a very “complex yet effective model” in choosing rally spots: “When we went to BJP with this plan and told them to follow this schedule, they could not move even a single location from here to there. If you change even one, it ruins the plan for the next one, and it goes on like a domino effect. Modi followed it almost exactly, barring last-minute diversions and requests from high-profile candidates.” One out- of-turn rally Modi addressed was in Amethi, a difficult seat where he needn’t have gone, says a BJP leader. “Of course, some subjective calls are always taken,” he adds.

There were other constraints as well. One was that Modi had to return to Gandhinagar every night. Another was that he had to be in two regions on a single day to sustain buzz around the country. The idea was that the local media should have something to write every day. But even the various stretches of Mod’s travel time were put to good use—sitting in his helicopter or flight or car from one venue to another, he would catch up on notes prepared for him by his team.

These notes were instant compilations of the news of the day besides local factors—such as key communities to appeal to and highly relevant local issues. CAG would give a chart-sheet with inputs to Modi’s office for every rally. “We would point out the main five news points about the particular constituency he was heading to. Who is the leader? What is the political scenario there? What are the key communities that you need to appeal to?” says a member. This list was also sent to the parliamentary constituency (PC) coordinator before each rally.

The Delhi war room, led by the likes of Manoj Ladwa and Vijay Chauthaiwale, also alerted Mod’s secretary who accompanied him on tour, Om Prakash, if there was a statement from a Congress leader that had to be countered in the next rally. “This in-between-rallies briefing helped sustain the momentum of tit-for-tat exchanges in which Modi was always leaps ahead of his rivals,” a BJP leader based in Gandhinagar says. During the height of the election, a team of two was exclusively assigned to monitoring Sonia Gandhi’s and Rahul Gandhi’s speeches—jumping in on any faux pas or comment criticising the BJP. Within ten minutes after their speech ended, Modi’s team would come up with a bullet-point summary of eight to ten points—including pro-UPA claims and anti-BJP/ NDA remarks—and shoot it off to Modi.

Modi was also briefed about what not to speak at rallies. “Modi himself suggested that we include a ‘don’t say’ category in our briefings for him,” says the CAG member, laughing meaningfully.

The video coverage of Modi’s rallies was also put to good use. The digital feeds were immediately edited by CAG and selective ‘good snippets’ were passed on to a coordinator to upload on WhatsApp —volunteers further distributed these amongst their individual networks. A summary of the rally would be compiled and sent out as well. The CAG team also sent bulk messages to each person who had attended the rally with a note of thanks. The online poll campaigners also connected with trolls and other BJP sympathisers. They urged them to disseminate the content on their web pages. With some of them enjoying close to half a million views, this was a valuable resource CAG could not afford to miss.

(Excerpted from The War Room: The People, Tactics and Technology Behind Narendra Modi’s 2014 Win by Ullekh NP, Roli Books, Rs 295, 176 pages)

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