THE ‘FIGURE' HEADS

Backroom strategists and their data-driven insights continue to transform India’s political ecosystem

- PRATHIMA NANDAKUMAR

Ever since BJP leader Pramod Mahajan and fellow strate-gist Sudhanshu Mittal rede-fined electioneering in India with their ‘India Shining’ campaign in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, poll campaigns in the country have never been the same.

A tectonic shift in electioneering came with the emergence of ‘backroom boys’—a new breed of poll strategists who are changing not just India’s poll landscape but its political ecosystem as well. If the conservative politician banks on traditional ways of knowing the popular pulse, the poll strategist’s biggest weapon is data. It was his emphasis on data-crunching that helped election strategist Prashant Kishor seal poll victories for various political clients— the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the Janata Dal (United) in the 2015 and 2020 Bihar assembly polls, YSR Congress in the 2019 Andhra Pradesh elections, and the DMK in the 2021 Tamil Nadu polls, to name a few.

Advocacy groups like Kishor’s I-PAC (Indian Political Action Committee) and Sunil Kanugolu’s Mindshare Analytics continue to redefine election campaigns. As India gears up for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the moves of backroom strategists like Kishor and Kanugolu are drawing a lot of attention.

Poll strategists have always been there in Indian politics, but they used to work in silos—until 2014, when all aspects of electioneering were brought under a single roof, with one person overseeing the end-to-end process. Earlier, it was strategists from within the party—such as Mahajan and Arun Jaitley in the BJP, Jairam Ramesh and Ahmed Patel in the Congress—who assumed the role of the war-room manager. But, with the advent of social media and related technologies, politicians began seeking outside help.