Exploiting emotional content of elections to neutralise media-induced hallucination
Before getting into the tactics, first a little description of a “benevolent” leader. This leader need not have charismatic appeal. Charisma is limited in time and across social groups; film actors can be charismatic, so was Raj Thackrey – we are looking for something deeper; if charisma is there, so much the better. A benevolent leader is one whom the people instinctively feel to be one of their own – which means he/she should be from the right social groups, he (she) should have neither an overtly intellectual or a physically weak appearance, and most importantly, he should be associated with a perception of kindness and magnanimity – what in our languages we would call a hriday samrat.
Now returning to the issue of strategy and tactics. I would put them crisply, point wise:
(1) In any election for State or national assembly, identify a benevolent (as described above) leader to lead the campaign.
(2) If trying to dislodge an adversarial government, this leader should try to channelise and amplify people’s anger and promise feasible deliverances.
(3) If defending an incumbent government, this leader should be able to rightfully defend his government’s performance.
(4) And here is the new element – points 1-3 will be usually insufficient to exploit the emotional trait to its full potential – introduce Hindutva into the campaign through grassroots level workers as explained below.
Why Hindutva? Because it has all the ability to complete the emotional circle and has profound tactical value far beyond that.
The role of Hindutva
When trying to dislodge a government – which will perforce be a sickular government as all non-BJP parties are sickular – raise injustices done to Hindus by the incumbents along with promises on temples, tirthasthanas and ashrams (maths). In case of national elections or of states lying on international border, raise geo-political issues (a component of Hindutva) like failures on terrorism, fight against internal and external enemies, transforming the country into an economic powerhouse, a proud, confident Bharat leading the world and talking to the US and China in equal terms instead of mewing and squeaking before them, etc. Take care to raise emotional and cultural issues dear to vanavasis and dalits. Also care should be taken not to get into minority-bashing mode – this is not Hindutva at all.
When defending an incumbent government, there should be sufficient Hindutva-related deliveries to demonstrate for earning the trust of the people. And also new areas to be promised.
Hindutva should be moulded according to local requirements. For example, in Maharashtra, the torture of Hindu sadhvis and others could have been a major issue. In Jharkhand, the complete dominance of minorities – particularly Christians – in all fields during President’s rule is a major issue. All the State’s universities have only minorities as VC’s. All the top Congress leaders – including State unit president and acting president – are minorities. The Congress has simply assumed that Hindus are goats – who cares for their sentiments? There are countless other examples beyond the scope of this note.
Now we come to the second – and more profound – tactical utility of Hindutva apart from completing the electoral emotional make-up. Just imagine what the media will do when the BJP starts raising Hindutva related issues. The media is not pro-Congress or anti-BJP, fundamentally it is anti-Hindutva and its hatred for BJP flows from the latter’s association with Hindutva. When the BJP starts raising Hindutva issues, the media’s anti-BJP campaign will get more and more shrill. When BJP becomes more stridently pro-Hindutva, the media will lose its balance and start screaming to its limits. And at that point the people will start questioning the intentions of the media. And then half the battle will be won. Suddenly all the issues that the media had obfuscated from the public – inflation, joblessness, unprecedented corruption, terrorism – the public will start seeing in a different light. In other words, you are forcing the media to expose both itself, and its clandestine symbiotic relationship with the government, before the public. The sweet faces of Priyanka and Rahul repeatedly flashed on TV screens will start tasting bitter.
When this happens you will suddenly find sections of the media breaking ranks and becoming politically neutral. For those who were earlier associated with the Ram Janamabhoomi movement, this sequence of predicted events was actually observed in practise. A lot of Hindi newspapers in UP were initially anti-BJP, in the early phase of that movement. TV and radio were in complete government control, pugnaciously sickular and anti-BJP. As the movement gathered pace and the jails started filling up with thousands of karsevaks, sections of the media broke – literally like the air-resistance “breaks” between two electrodes as you increase the potential difference – and became pro-Hindu. And they remained pro-Hindu till May 2009.
To implement this plan in practise, two important elements are needed:
(1) All our spokespersons should be blatantly, pugnaciously harsh in dealing with the media. Aggression and anger should be their hallmarks. All spokesmen who cannot be harsh should be removed. And only official spokesmen – no freelancers – should go before the media. More importantly, never get into the trap of discussing Hindutva before the media. The latter will try to repeatedly force the impression that Hindutva is Muslim and Christian bashing. They should be told that this is not Hindutva. Then what is it? Find out yourself and then talk about it – should be our answer.
(2) The BJP right from the national president to the mandal worker should be clear in its intentions and stick to its guns – we are provoking the media to make them lose credibility before the people. We are trying to expose the media-Congress nexus and split their ranks. If you lose focus it is easy to fall into a trap.
Even as we play out all the above tactical steps, we must continue in parallel to slowly but surely increase our net influence over the POM, which is a constructive, strategic, long-term mode of work in the Sangh tradition.
Thus openly espousing the cause of Hindutva – something we have shied away from since around 2000 (note that a mention of Hindutva in a presidential speech is not equal to espousing its cause) – will serve two major advantages. One, a direct electoral advantage by complementing the people’s emotional make-up in all electoral battles. And two, striking at the heart of the mechanism that converts our electoral system into a half-democracy – public opinion manipulation through mass hallucination created by media – by major attenuation of the media’s ability to hallucinate people and manipulate opinion.
Since we started with the Maharashtra elections, let us see what went wrong vis-à-vis the four-step process highlighted above.
Final analysis of Maharashtra debacle
First, there was no benevolent leader leading the campaign. Officially, the Shiv Sena and its leader Uddhav was leading it – but for the very fact that he seemed to be embroiled in a fight with his brother (again note how cleverly the media highlighted this aspect), the impression of benevolence was neutralised. Gopinath Munde would have been a far better person to lead this campaign. In fact, in 1995 when we had dislodged the incumbent he was indeed the leader of opposition. Fortunately, he is likely to be so again, and right from the start he should function as the centre of the opposition campaign – and not a frail man sitting in Mumbai, writing knife-sharp comments in his Saamna. Once the first step of the process remained unattained, the other steps got automatically blocked.
Second, absence of Hindutva at the grass roots level – both from the SS and the BJP – though there was plenty of potential for the same. Again contrast this with the situation in 1995. And what happened to our emotional content in the electoral battle? Both its possible components – a benevolent leader and Hindutva – remained stillborn right at start. And the thesis advanced by our leadership post-2000 – good performance begets repeat governments and poor performance throws them out – in this our theoretically perfect democracy in Bharat that is India – fell flat on its face.
And in the process generated strategic and tactical analysis and rethink, which contains the seeds for a more powerful, resurgent BJP leading a transformed and glorious Bharat to even greater glory and world domination – for the world can only be saved by a dominance of the Hindu civilisation.
Conclusions
(1) Analysis of a string of past elections culminating with Maharashtra proves that what prevails in India today is only half-democracy – only the nature of manipulation has metamorphosed from gross physical malpractice in the past to subtle opinion-manipulation through foreign-controlled media-induced mass hallucination in the present.
(2) Bearing in mind the burden of point 1, there exists a unique feature of Indian democracy that still facilitates its potential functionality as a vehicle for national transformation, provided that feature can be identified and used with proper strategy and tactics.
(3) That unique feature is the preponderance of emotion in mass yet noiseless decision making by the electorate – and this feature has been proved repeatedly, without exception, across all elections.
(4) This emotion can be harnessed by a benevolent leader who personifies burning issues (which could be, but need not all be, good/poor performance by the incumbent) as well as by a heightened consciousness of Hindutva. In the absence of an emotional harness good/poor incumbent-performance has only minor impact on electoral result – this being a major deviation from the party’s central view that had crystallised over the last five years.
(5) The heightened consciousness of Hindutva serves a second tactical purpose – to perforce provoke reaction from the media which when driven harder will entrap the latter to expose itself and thus uplift the blanket of imposed hallucination from the people.
(6) In all future elections to State and national assemblies, BJP should fight under one (for an election) benevolent leader who personifies the burning issues and with the right depth and content of Hindutva which needs to vary according to location.
Only in this way it is still possible to functionalise our half democracy into a vehicle of national transformation.
(Concluded)
(The writer can be contacted at 5, Straight Mile Road, Northern Town, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand-831 001.)
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