2014: The Election That Changed India (38 page)

By the third week of February, Pandey’s team
was ready with its presentation. The BJP had set up a war room in Delhi at 1, Lodhi Estate, a cosy
Lutyens bungalow near the busy Khan Market which had been assigned to its Goa MP, Shripad Naik. The
power elite of the BJP gathered to watch the ad pitch. Jaitley, Swaraj, Shah, Goyal, Nirmala
Sitharaman were joined by pro-Modi business executives like Sunil Alagh, right-leaning columnists
Swapan Dasgupta and Ashok Malik, and new BJP entrants M.J. Akbar and Hardeep Puri.

With so many influential voices in one room, there
was bound to be some disagreement. Should the campaign slogan be, as the ad agency was suggesting,
‘
Abki Baar Modi Sarkar
’, or should it be ‘
Abki Baar Bhajpa
Sarkar
’? Sushma Swaraj preferred the latter slogan because she felt that the party must
be kept ahead of any personality cult. She was overruled by the Shah–Jaitley duo (some
insiders even credit Shah with the original Abki Baar Modi Sarkar idea). Jaitley pulled out surveys
which showed Modi’s popularity well above that of the BJP. ‘This election is
presidential, let’s keep it that way,’ was the overall consensus.

Three weeks later, party president Rajnath Singh
went ahead and tweeted, ‘Time for Change, Time for BJP,
Bahut Hui Mehngai ki Maar, Abki
Baar BJP Sarkar
.’ Within minutes, he had withdrawn the tweet, and twitted ‘time for
Modi’. In 2014, there was no escaping the Modi factor. The man, in a sense, was the message,
artfully packaged. His face would dominate every creative.

The overarching campaign tag line had been clinched.
Pandey and team now got down to preparing the creatives. The first outdoor hoarding came up on 7
March at 5.30 a.m. on Delhi’s Minto Road. The copy was simple—
‘Janata Maaf Nahi
Karegi. Bahut Hua Bhrastachar, Abki Baar Modi Sarkar!’
(The voter will not forgive.
Enough of corruption, time for Modi government.) ‘Mehngai’

(inflation) and
‘Bhrastachar’ (corruption) would be recurring themes to reflect public disgust against
UPA 2.

The first week of March, was, as Pandey puts it,
‘crazily exhausting’. A 100 television commercial spots—ten each in different
languages—were shot in a span of ten days. ‘We shot them as black-and-white commercials
with “real” people speaking in their local language. We wanted the idea that the average
man on the street was angry to resonate,’ says Pandey. Phase one of the campaign had been
unleashed on the nation.

Then came a real brainwave. The World T20 was
starting in Bangladesh on 16 March through to 6 April. Pandey was a cricket addict, having played
Ranji Trophy for Rajasthan. Jaitley had been involved in cricket administration for years.
‘Why don’t we create a political campaign around cricket and push it on Star Sports
while the Cup is on,’ was Pandey’s suggestion. In a cricket-crazy country, it was the
perfect pitch.

Pandey’s team got to work again. This time,
they came up with a series of animation commercials that linked politics to cricket. The first one
was a classic. An umpire goes for the toss with the captains, only to find one captain is missing.
The punchline is
‘Bina kaptan ki team khai maar, abki baar Modi Sarkar’
(A team
without a captain loses, this time vote for a Modi government). ‘I don’t think anyone
has used animation in a political campaign. People just loved it. It showed that voting for Modi was
a “cool” thing to do!’ Pandey told me. Seventeen animation films were
done—often four or five in a night—and plastered right through the T20 and IPL
season.

The cricket ads were only a bridge before the final
assault on the eve of elections in April. If the first phase of creatives in the build-up had been
about anger, round two would be about ‘hope’. Another simple message to communicate the
idea of ‘Modi = Hope’ was needed. The concept ‘
Achhe Din Aanewale
Hain
’ (Good days are coming) was born, the line and song attributable to Soho
Square’s creative head, Anurag Khandelwal.

When the presentation was made to the BJP team at 1
Lodhi Estate, opinion was divided. Some BJP leaders were worried that
the
‘acche din’ focus could become another India Shining, the 2004 BJP campaign that had
gone so terribly wrong. ‘Should we be raising hopes of people so soon?’ was the query.
This time, Jaitley and Sushma, for once, were on the same side. The country was steeped in
negativism, Modi was offering a shift in mood—the ‘acche din’ idea was approved.
The line would stick in the minds of millions.

In a telephone conversation with my son Ishan who is
studying medicine in Manipal in Karnataka, I asked him what the election buzz was on campus.
‘Dad, achche din aanewale hain!’
he replied. Clearly, the BJP was onto another
winner.

The backstory of the BJP’s ad campaign reveals
much of how passionately the party fought and won the 2014 campaign. For one, there is every reason
to believe that Modi empowered his team fully. There was minimal interference from the leadership
which ensured quick decision-making, so crucial in a frenetic election campaign. When a new ad was
ready, it would often be sent via WhatsApp, sometimes late in the night, to Modi’s office. His
assistant, O.P. Singh, would show it to the Gujarat chief minister, who would revert almost
instantaneously.

Pandey says that Modi intervened just twice. First,
when there was a view that the advertising campaign should emphasize ‘
Dus Saal Se Bhura
Haal
’ (Ten years of bad governance). ‘I went to tell him that we didn’t think
it worked, he just said, “
Piyushji, aage badhiye
[carry on],”’ recalls
Pandey. On another occasion, he was shown a creative with a green line running through at the bottom
of every Modi poster. Modi looked at it and changed it to a diagonal line. ‘It was actually
better than the original,’ laughs Pandey.

The campaign highlights once again the centrality of
‘Team Modi’ and its business-like approach to the campaign. Political campaigns can be
notoriously unstructured—king-size egos and internal battles can often be a recipe for chaos.
The BJP managed to bring in a strong professional element to their communications strategy and
worked in unison.

Manoj Ladwa, a London-born, UK-based lawyer whom
Modi trusted implicitly, was in charge of the in-house media research team
and had to ensure that all the messaging went out smoothly. The forty-one-year-old Ladwa had
met Modi through the Gujarati NRI network in the 1990s, and despite the age difference, had struck
an instant rapport. He had also lobbied for Modi with the British government after the 2002 riots.
Another Modi man from Gujarat, Vijay Chauthaiwale, who was a molecular biologist and an ABVP
activist, handled the back-room operations and coordinated between the Delhi and Gandhinagar war
rooms. Ajay Singh, who had worked closely on the India Shining campaign with Pramod Mahajan in 2004,
was a key figure in the media buying and planning. Piyush Goyal was the man for all seasons, a
crisis manager and the one who controlled the money flow. Shah was the political ideas man. Jaitley
was the final word on the creatives.

‘We soon realized that we were not dealing
with any other political party, but one that was following a professional work ethic that even most
corporates could not match,’ says Sam Balsara, chairman and managing director of Madison. The
respect is mutual. Goyal gives Madison ‘eleven out of ten’ for the media plan.

But the third, and most remarkable, factor was the
sheer intensity of the BJP campaign. In the space of about nine weeks, Soho Square created about 200
unique TV commercials, 300 radio spots and over 1000 press and outdoor creatives. Madison’s
media plan involved taking more than 130,000 ad spots across 226 channels, 9000 insertions in 295
publications and sixteen languages, and 150,000 ads on websites.

On every voting day, the newspapers of the region
going to the polls would be splashed with Modi advertisements in the local language. Every regional
channel—news or general entertainment—would have a Modi ad roadblock at 9 on the night
before a poll. ‘We probably prepared about 500 TV commercials in the end because we
weren’t sure what the Election Commission would approve. One Election Commission official even
told us,
“Ab aur kitna dikhaoge!”
[How much more will you show],’ says a
member of the ad team.

The ‘localization’ was, in fact, a
distinctive feature of the Modi campaign. Ad films and songs were even made in local dialects
like Bhojpuri and Maithili to target the Bihar voter. Separate ad campaigns were
created for the five regions of Uttar Pradesh. More BJP ads were done in Urdu than ever before,
including one in the Kashmir Valley with the message—‘
Jannat Yahan, Tarakki
Kahan
’ (This Is Heaven, but Where Is the Progress). Spots were taken on FM channels in
all small towns. If the ad in Bengal highlighted the chit fund scam, the one in Uttarakhand would
focus on the lack of flood relief. ‘I think this micro-level messaging was the big difference
between 2004 and 2014. This time, we took no chances,’ says Ajay Singh.

There was a party anthem as well, composed by
lyricist and ad man Prasoon Joshi and sung by Sukhwinder. It had a high-pitched, almost jingoistic
flavour to it—
Saugandh mujhe iss mitti ki, mein desh nahi mitne doonga
(I swear on
Mother Earth, I will not allow this country to be destroyed). Personally, I didn’t find the
song striking the right notes, but Modi loved the words so much, he used them in a speech. Modi
himself appears in the song with a clenched fist. The song was played on the entertainment channels
because, as a media planner puts it, ‘that’s where the real viewership is’. It was
even translated into Punjabi for the audience in that state.

Two instances highlight the sheer energy of the Modi
advertising blitz. The first was when Modi in mid-April went to file his nomination from Varanasi
amidst massive crowds. The television images of the motorcade suggested a surge of support for him.
Almost overnight, a fresh commercial with visuals from Varanasi and Modi’s ‘
Ma Ganga
ne bulaya hai’
sound bite was created. ‘It was a powerful scene that had great
recall value. The viewer could connect “achche din” to the euphoria around Modi,’
is how a brand strategist describes it to me.

Pandey has an even better story to share. In early
May, Modi took a sudden decision to hold a rally in Amethi, the bastion of the Gandhi family. Just
two days before the rally, Pandey got a call from Goyal, saying Modi was keen that a film be created
around Amethi’s neglect. Pandey was in Goa with his ailing mother-in-law and said it would be
difficult to get away. ‘Please, Piyush, you have to do
this for us. I
will be forever obliged to you and I will owe your wife big time,’ said Goyal. Within hours,
the two Piyushes were flying off to Ahmedabad.

For the next twenty-four hours, Pandey and his
creative partner from O&M, Rajkumar Jha, worked on putting together an Amethi film from a small
studio in Ahmedabad. A camera team was sent to Amethi to get pictures of crater-like roads, and
shanties. The pictures were uploaded via computer from Lucknow, a ninety-minute drive from Amethi.
‘It was almost unreal. We were scripting, editing and recording in Ahmedabad, even as someone
was shooting in Amethi and sending pictures from Lucknow!’ says Pandey.

At 8 the next morning, a few hours before the
evening rally, an eight-minute film was ready and flown off to Lucknow. The title of the film was
Amethi: Congress ke Liye Vote kee Peti
(Amethi: A Vote Bank for the Congress), and it was
shown at the rally. ‘It was the craziest twenty-four hours in my advertising career, but I
loved it and felt twenty-five all over again!’ says the fifty-nine-year-old with a glint in
the eye.

The energy levels didn’t drop till the last
day of the campaign. Denied permission to hold a rally in Varanasi by the district administration,
Modi embarked on a successful roadshow through the city’s streets on 8 May. Buoyed by the
response, the BJP’s media team sensed an opportunity for a fresh campaign film. Within
twenty-four hours, a film with shots of Modi in Varanasi was readied—it was fine-tuned at
least a couple of times—and aired continuously till the moment the campaign officially
ended.

It is this intensity which was missing in the
Congress advertising campaign. I had seen shades of it in 2004 when Jairam Ramesh and a small team
had developed the ‘Aam Aadmi’ slogan. Then, perhaps, the Congress had nothing to lose. I
had witnessed it again in 2009 when the Congress successfully stuck to its ‘aam aadmi’
theme. In 2014, the Congress didn’t have a big idea nor the hunger to execute it.

The ‘aam aadmi’ patent was no longer
with the Congress. Kejriwal’s party had usurped, almost ‘stolen’ it, and built
their own political model around it. Moreover, with price rise hurting the
common man, the ‘aam aadmi’ tag was never going to win hearts. ‘We needed
something different, a concept that would stand out in comparison with the competition,’ is
how one Congress leader puts it.

The BJP campaign was Modi-centric. The Congress
decided early enough that while Rahul would be the face of the campaign, the slogans would suggest
that a party and the country were above any individual. The Congress theme tried to capture the idea
of an ‘inclusive’ India. That’s how the original tag lines were
conceived—‘Main Nahin, Hum’ (Not Me, Us), ‘
Tode Nahi, Jode
’
(Unite, not Divide) and the umbrella concept of ‘
Har Haath Shakti, Har Haath
Tarakki
’ (Strength and Progress for All). The posters had Rahul in the middle, surrounded
by anonymous faces, dressed so as to denote ethnic origins—Muslim girl in a headscarf, Sikh
boy in a turban, an Adivasi in a dhoti. It clearly lacked originality. ‘We wanted to show that
the BJP was about a divisive personality cult, while we stood for every Indian,’ is how Jairam
Ramesh describes it.