Vinit is an IT pro, who quit IBM in 2003 to join the BJP team full time. He had an interesting sustenance model – he went to his friends group and asked if they were ready to help him follow his dream. Each of 20 friends decided to contribute 2,000 per month to Vinit to help him sustain his family. It also helped that his wife is a working professional. So this was the beginning of his political journey. (Some one in the audience asked him, what if I don’t have 20 such friends, he quipped, ‘Then don’t jump into politics.’) The party has a reasonably good induction program. Initial selections were made by Pramod Mahajan and Company. The volunteers then were put to through their paces by senior politicians and also retired generals.
Vinit comes out with an interesting history of propaganda and the change in tools used over time. Hitler was one of the first masters of propaganda – and used with a great degree of success, the pamphlet. It is said that Goebbel, Hitler’s I & B minister, printed pamphlets in such large quantity that they exceeded the total number of books that had been printed in Germany from the beginning of printing. It is said of the pamphlet, that even an illiterate would pick it up – and go to a wise man to ask, Tell me what does this say? And of course, most of us want to believe that if it is printed, it must be true…
An interesting use of pamphlets in India is by Bhagat Singh, who was famous for throwing a bomb in the Lahore assembly (no one died in that) and also throwing some pamphlets. The pamphlets are remembered, more than what was in them. I hunted wikipedia for that: The nominal intention was to protest against the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Dispute Act, which had been rejected by the Assembly but were being enacted by the Viceroy using his special powers; the actual intention was for the perpetrators to get themselves arrested so that they could use appearances in court as a stage to publicise their cause. In the leaflet he stated: “It is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill the ideas. Great empires crumbled, while the ideas survived.”
The next evolution of propaganda was Television. This was used to good effect by JFK in the 1960’s. The leap after that came in 2008, which was Obama’s use of social media. The 2008 Obama campaign was the template used by the BJP for the Modi campaign. This way the party could avoid mass media and PR agencies using unmoderate, unedited direct communication. The first IT initiatives started in 2007 by the Maharashtra BJP unit, which was then headed by Nitin Gadkari – those were the days of bulk SMSes, Orkut and Blogs. During the 2014 election campaign, lakhs of volunteers are free to tweet / whatsapp whatever they wished subject to the following constraints: The contents must be honest, The language must be parliamentary and of course, it should hit the opponent hard.
One of the highlights of the campaign has been a strong reliance on Analytics. They started with a survey of 300 parliamentary constituencies, where most people said that they were fed up with the current leadership, and what they wanted was a strong leader. In fact, later on one of the audience members, validated that when he expressed disappointment that the local MLAs of Pune have created a disconnect with Modi’s great work like Swach Bharat, by illogically opposing the compulsory helmet rule. He said that he had not voted for the MLA, but for Modi!
Vinit’s response was interesting. He said that any party has to have internal democracy, one cannot have all people with the same opinion. What he implied was something different. What the IT cell does is that every night from 1 am to 5 am, it number crunches tweets, FB posts etc to gauge a macro parameter to judge junta opinion. The Greens are supporters, The Reds are opposers and the Grays are fence sitters. If a policy has backfired, (more reds than greens) immediate missives are sent to the party / government to backtrack. So probably the helmet rule not being imposed is a popular move, hence it goes under the carpet, Modi’s cleanliness wave not withstanding..
An interesting audience question was about Vinit’s view on Sec 66A of the IT act. This is the one that allows a police SHO to imprison a person for a FB post. He walked a tightrope on that one – saying that it is his personal wish to see this go – but hinting that the government is unlikely to do that.