The campaign for the 30th April phase of polling ended yesterday. I finished my Amritsar campaign. Between the declaration of candidature and the finishing line, it was a seven week campaign. A long campaign is challenging to sustain. Besides a team of dedicated supporters and a well oiled election machinery, a candidate requires some ingenuity of mind to keep the voters’ interest in the campaign. To repeat the same theme over a period of seven weeks could bore the voter’s interest, pushing him to lose the concentration.
Modern day techniques of campaign have proved to be a great asset. My daily morning blog was an integral part of my campaign. It connected me even to a couple of lakh people in Amritsar itself. These were amongst those who followed me on the Facebook or received the repost. I addressed between ten to fifteen programmes everyday. Visit to houses of important citizens, where there was a significant gathering of few hundred people brought direct rapport with me and a section of the citizenry. The Akali Dal organization in the villages is extremely strong and committed.
I was faced with the campaign by the Congress which has run out of ideas. The Captain decided to deal with me the way he has dealt with Akali Dal through his career – be rude, discourteous and fabricate allegations – something will stick. Unfortunately for him he was dealing with a different kind of campaign. My campaign was issue centric both at the national level and region of Amritsar. I was able to get back at him, politely but firmly. A lumpen campaign strategy of the Captain was hardly likely to succeed against me.
How to manufacture a Campaign?
As the campaign enters the last two phases the Congress party’s campaign was a text book lesson of how not to organize the campaign. The speech writers of the Congress leaders thought that pedestrian points such as the Centre giving grants to the States, RTI, Food Bill, Land Bill were the key campaign issues. They had completely ignored the popular view. The whole country had realized in December itself, when the results of the four State assemblies were declared, that the Congress is on its way out. The anti incumbency against the Congress was there to succeed.
Even though Narendra Modi had captured the popular imagination, the Congress thought that if Chidambaram, Sibal, Tiwari, Jairam, Anand Sharma and Beni Prasad were exceptionally rude and discourteous, they would demolish what they thought was the Modi myth. They ended up demolishing themselves. Most of them either did not contest or are likely to come third in their own constituencies.
The Jairams and the Sibals have been God’s special gift to the Congress. They then decided to manufacture a new campaign. They clapped like a child thinking that the ‘Toffee Campaign’ was working even though it was based on falsehood. Rahul had decided to do a Kejriwal. Having misused the CBI for the last ten years Sibal was back now to abusing the CBI for not prosecuting Modi in a case of no evidence in the Ishrat Jehan case. A new bright face in the media, Surjewala, discovered a motley crowd posing for a photograph with Modi and spotted one rogue in it. His smugness showed that he believed that the Congress had won the election on this ground. When nothing succeeded, the ‘snoopgate’ was given a rebirth hoping that it would succeed. But when things go wrong, they could go horribly wrong. Thus it didn’t succeed. These are the pitfalls of contesting elections without an issue and then manufacturing a campaign based on non issues. The Congress ended up buying its own propaganda.