“In elections, the market is peoples’ need for good governance”: Meet the Backroom Boys of Telangana Polls

NP NEWS NETWORK

Telangana

“In elections, the market is peoples’ need for good governance. Based on their perceptions about candidates, people purchase good governance using votes. Positioning in politics is the process of creating the desired perception or position in the voters’ minds. Naturally, all politicians and political parties aim to achieve the most desirable position through a mix of selecting appropriate candidates and managing communication carefully.

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However, success ultimately rests with how people actually perceive a candidate and not what the candidate wants to be perceived as or actually is.” says 22-year old political strategist, Akhil Ennamsetty, who has been working in Telangana for various constituencies. Akhil, belonging to Warangal is a final-year law student at Symbiosis Law School, Pune who has been hired by one of the prominent political consultancies in the country for the upcoming polls. Akhil has the experience of working in the masses as a student union leader, while he has also worked as a legislative intern to the Hon’ble Speaker of the Telangana State Assembly in the past. He now also runs a non-governmental organisation in the tribal areas of Telangana which provides legal aid to the deprived Adivasis. This background of him provides an edge in reaching out his strategies to the cadres and masses more effectively and deeply.

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“We work upon increasing voter turnout through technological and in-person intervention. It is possible to swing it by four to five per cent in favour of our clients. Voters in Telangana are very concerned about their local area problems and development. National political waves have a very negligible role in the South. Voters here do not vote in the elections by looking at the face of Modi or Gandhi, but upon the good-will of state-level leaders and sometimes even the Mandal and Taluka level leaders. Such situations get extremely challenging for us, because there are too many influencers upon the voters in the local level. We rely upon our confidential political intelligence units to tackle these micro trends. We have empirical data on each of the constituencies we work in. All of this requires a lot of planning which includes 3-4 years of meticulous data collection, collating information in a scientific manner, and making timely actionable analysis.” says Akhil.

Pavan Thota is another such young strategist who is based at Hyderabad. He has the experience of working in the top brass of the youth-wing of a prominent political party in Telangana & Andhra Pradesh. He has been leading various social movements in the State before he started to work as a Poll Strategist. He says “Our Information Technology cell monitors the social media round the clock for all conversations in which our clients are being discussed and we use personalised messaging to outline the policies, manifesto, and the overall vision of our clients. We first use deep analytics to understand group communication behaviour and then use appropriate technology to communicate with them.”

“For each polling booth, data analytics is used to segregate voters into blocks to determine who are pro, or undecided, or against our clients. After such research, we tell the clients frankly about their chances of victory. But, they always want to contest; keep contesting elections is their compulsion” says Akhil, explaining the client behaviour.

Pavan feels that the market for politics in India has changed dramatically in the last decade, thanks to the new growing and powerful segment of voters that does not confirm to the traditional boundaries of voters – the new middle class. He says that the unsatisfied needs of the new middle class voters created an opportunity for new politicians to position themselves appropriately on the national scene and gain support of this segment.

One may consider politics more art than science, particularly in a country like India where literacy levels are not up to the mark, but with elections becoming a serious business of complex strategies and massive campaign involving crores of rupees, candidates are adopting scientific methods to strategise and manage campaigns in both urban and rural areas.

Consultants are fast replacing their traditional counterparts, political gurus, mainly because of the increasing number of new faces with little political background – and mostly without a political mentor – getting party tickets.

Besides poll management, candidates hire political consultants for speech writing and media management like giving interviews to local dailies and channels, and analysis of news relevant to their constituency to ensure that they strike the right chord during their public rallies. These strategists charge anything from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 50 lakh depending on the services.