The Campaign Makers

Political strategy and consulting firms have mushroomed across the country over the last decade. As India gears up for elections, they are already on the road, using data to drive campaigns that can help swing polls.

- Pooja Sarkar

It was the winter of 2017. Amit Vij, then 39, was working as vice president-corporate affairs with Reliance Industries. Twenty-one days before the Punjab assembly elections in February, he ended up getting a ticket from the Indian National Congress to contest from Pathankot.

Vij is no stranger to politics as his father Anil Vij is a senior Congress leader from the same region. But this was his first big battle and Vij hired Gurugram-based political consulting firm PoliticalEdge to help him strategise for the election. After all, he was contesting against BJP’s Ashwani Kumar Sharma, who had won the seat in 2012 with a 19 percent margin.

“There were challenges at various levels as Amit was contesting against a seasoned politician,” says Saurabh Vyas, founder, PoliticalEdge.

After analysing Vij’s profile and the demography of the Pathankot constituency, PoliticalEdge came up with three important insights: To focus on youth and promise to industrialise and create jobs, to use his personality trait of being humble and soft-spoken to differentiate him from others, and lastly, as he was not seen in the constituency as a regular politician, it was decided that he would do a rigorous doorto-door house campaign, spending 18 hours on the field every day.

“The strategy, based on data insights, was dynamically changing and we had to create a data analysis and war room from the very first day,” says Vyas. “It was like a 24hour cycle where at the end of the day you recalibrate the campaign and fine-tune the strategy for the next day... we did this over ten days till the final campaign took shape.”