When the Campaign Manager is more celebrated than the Campaigner

A new and bizarre affliction has struck Lutyens Media since the 2014 election. In its eagerness to celebrate “strategists” where none exist it has gone an overdrive to celebrate routine campaign managers in a never before witnessed manner in Indian elections.

Those who have really been involved in the thick and thin of election campaigns in India know the reality that elections continue to be won largely on the strength of one of two factors — a perceived wave in favor of the lead campaigner or the sum total of local loyalties determined by demographics chief among which continues to be caste.

New age campaign techniques leveraging technology have a long way to go in India to influence a Municipal Ward election leave alone swinging an entire Lok Sabha constituency. Mission 272 was an exception in Indian Campaigns not because new age campaign techniques were adopted by the rank and file machinery but because it engaged a large number of volunteers who operated outside the party machinery. They may not have swung the outcome decisively at the booth but the volunteers made a marked impact in amplification of the campaign message via Social Media thus acting as a firewall against mainstream media.

Rank and file Party Campaign Machinery across the political spectrum continue to operate in an Old School mode relying on traditional modes of communication and engagement for the most part with intuition overriding data science by a wide margin.

Thus it is funny to see Lutyens Media worthies loosely bandy around labels like “master strategist” when the reality of campaigns is far less glamorous for the campaign manager.

If these new age campaign managers being celebrated by Lutyens Media were indeed such “master strategists” as the media spin makes them out to be then one needs to ask how is it that Lalu emerged more powerful than Nitish to call the shots in Bihar when the so called “genius” of the campaign was all about Nitish ?