Terms of Trade: Ways to look at the rise of electoral consultants in India

Terms of Trade: Ways to look at the rise of electoral consultants in India

Terms of Trade: How to look at the rise of electoral consultants in India ByRoshan Kishore Feb 21, 2025 04:37 PM IST Share Via Copy Link A new book gives an excellent account of the rise of political consultants but there is merit in looking at the larger political economy of their rise.

Political/electoral consultants or managers in India are now a well-known and widespread tribe. How should we look at their rise? Is it a reflection of India’s elections, and more importantly, politics becoming more modern? Is it leading to a weakening of party organisations? What about its impact on core ideology of parties? A book published by Amogh Dhar Sharma, a young political scientist at Oxford University, has made an excellent attempt to answer some of these questions. This author was invited to a panel discussion on the book this week and today’s column is a result of reflections on the larger political economy around the risk of electoral consultants.

PREMIUM The Parliament House in New Delhi. (Bloomberg)

Sharma’s book, The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, is lucidly written, offers a comprehensive historical account of how election campaigns evolved in India across time and political parties. It also tells us how the BJP, which now has the most professionalised and tech-heavy campaign machinery in India was at one point of time extremely critical of these things.

Beyond its historical narrative, the book looks at both supply and demand side factors, which have led to the rise of political/electoral consultants in India and argues that what differentiates the BJP from any other political party in deployment of these workers is the fact even its consultants/technocrats are ideologically aligned to the party rather than just hired hands for a particular election. Simply speaking, there is a lot to be learnt by reading the book and you do not need to be a political scientist to be able to read it.

Academic projects, however, have a limited scope, especially for an early-stage researcher. This is why there is some merit in devoting this edition of the column in looking at the larger political economy of the rise of electoral consultants in India. Any such analysis has to begin with three broad party-agnostic strands to Indian politics, and therefore elections, today.

First is a tendency of centralisation of executive and therefore political power at level of government and the party. This is best reflected in the rising power of the prime minister’s or chief minister’s office in governments and the centralised nature of campaigns centered around the head of the executive. Campaigns, both for incumbent governments and parties in opposition, are now increasingly person-centric. While these processes have been underway for some time now, one can say with some degree of confidence that they have reached a peak across the country today.

The second is the centrality of welfare in the political narrative at every level of political competition. Once again, the process started much earlier, but the last decade has seen a concerted focus on the attribution aspect of this dialectic between the leader and the voter where welfare benefits are portrayed as a direct gift from the head (or wannabe head) of the government. The details of this process and its impact on current day party-competition in India have been flagged in an excellent paper by political scientists Yamini Aiyar and Neelanjan Sircar.

Third is the broad acceptance of the TINA factor where almost every government in India is now reconciled to capitalist development led by big capital. The important factor here is not capital over state, a debate which was resolved much earlier with economic reforms, but the growing primacy of big capital over small/provincial capital.

Important as these developments are, they cannot wish away the key realpolitik constraint of electioneering in India.

India’s parliamentary democracy ties the political fortunes of even a very strong or popular leader to that of hundreds of MP or MLA candidates in elections. The route to power is by getting these peoples to win. Ideology aside, these local level political actors have their own material aspirations from a successful career in what is now an extremely expensive political competition to participate in. The material rewards of politics can only be harvested by usurping as many rent-seeking realms as possible. If the party leadership/head of government were to impose significant constraints on these aspirations it would lead to a reduction in the pool of candidates who would either not have or be unwilling to spend the necessary resources during elections. Herein lies the fundamental contradiction of India’s current day political economy.

Ironically, the biggest squeeze on such rent-seeking activities has come from a technological disruption in the manner in which welfare benefits are delivered in India. The JAM trinity (Jan Dhan-Aadhar-Mobile) has managed to reduce significantly the leakage/rent-seeking which used to exist earlier. The JAM disruption has allowed the top leadership of the political party to bypass the constituency-level leadership in delivery and attribution of welfare benefits. Unsurprisingly, this has led to material losses for local level politicians. However, top leadership of parties/governments still need someone to sincerely champion the narrative. This is the first entry point for a locally non-aligned political campaigner during elections whose material interests are not rooted in local level rent seeking.

The second important change in politics has come from the fragmentation of existing subaltern social categories in Indian elections. Categories such as OBCs and even Dalits in many states are now anything but monolithic unlike a few decades ago. Political parties are now aware of the risks and rewards associated with deployment (or lack of it) of more fine-tuned social engineering while putting up candidates. This often requires tapping into narratives and information which the entrenched local leadership of a party might not willing or able to do for its own partisan interests. This is the second entry point for political intelligence gathering without local stake.

What has helped top-level politicians in deploying consultants to deal with these challenges are two factors. One, the roll-out of JAM has de facto opened up the possibility of political parties (via governments) coming in possession of detailed data sets of the electorate, which not just gives their socio-economic attributes but also political-social coordinates. This is difficult to prove with documentary evidence but eminently believable that there are no walls between the government and the party here. It is not entirely implausible that political consultants working for political parties are given access to these datasets to work with. This can lead to targeted campaigns during elections or crucial data inputs into deciding issues/candidates. Minus this digital footprint infrastructure and the data generated by it, the efficacy would be extremely limited.

The second factor, which has facilitated the rise of political consultants is the entry of big political finance even at the state level. Election campaigns are now increasingly run with a top-down political finance model than a bottom-up one. This has made big consultants and the spending they may advocate affordable for a lot of parties. There is a clear link with rise of big capital in the country in this development.

While the arguments given above situate the rise of political consultants in the realm of what I would like to call the economic base, there is an equally important story to be told in what can describe as the superstructure. The story goes as follows.

Two back-to-back disruptions in India led to a significant squeeze on the powers of the erstwhile (upper caste) social elite. The first was the rising assertion of OBCs in electoral politics which neutralised to a great extent the monopoly of upper castes in political representation. It was the Congress which suffered the most in this churn in Indian politics. The so-called subaltern revolution in political representation was followed by the enactment of OBC reservations, which has led to a drop in upper caste domination in the top bureaucracy which wields a lot of power in Indian political economy. While upper castes still have a formidable presence in the top bureaucracy, one can cannot deny that the dominance has weakened over time.

Minus the growth of private capital – more managerial than entrepreneurial in nature – in post-reform India, this old elite would have seen a significant worsening in its material fortunes. This has created a deep affinity for private capital in the subconscious of this class. The development of private capital and its managerial army in India has also given a boost to what can be described as a social/development sector managerial class which has come to exert a significant influence on activities of the Indian state without being a part of either the political or bureaucratic arms of the government.

While this is not to say that their motivations cannot be driven by a genuine urge to improve things, what is also true is that it has created an influential class which can bypass competition to either enter politics or the bureaucracy. The growing preference for political consultancy by well-educated and professionally successful young people ought to be seen as yet another manifestation of this aspirational lateral entry route.

Two more things need to be flagged here.

One, there is a strand of academic work such as the book Brand New Nation by Ravinder Kaur which argues that private capital’s attempts to develop a brand for post-reform India have found conformity rather than contradiction with a culturally monolithic imagery of India which is in sync with the larger project of the Hindu Right. This only adds to the existing conservative, if not communal outlook of a large part of old Indian capital, as has been shown in great detail by Akshay Mukul’s brilliant work on the Gita Press.

Second is the fact that while the first Mandal Commission was seen as the urban elite upper caste by an act powered by Mandal parties, they perhaps developed a deep animosity towards the Congress after its enactment of Mandal 2.0 in the first UPA government. The BJP’s recent pivot towards social justice is often seen as a forced play rather than vanguardist action. The fact that it is still non-committal to things such as conducting a caste census and also brought in reservations for economically weaker upper castes only gives credence to this theory.

The first and second factors described above have led to a significant weakening of Congress’s ideological traction as a pan-India political force at the national level. The Congress, for purely electoral purposes today, has been reduced to a political party which is only a force in reckon with in a handful of regional contests where its leadership can successfully exploit or align itself through alliances with local and transactional rather than national and ideological factors.

This is exactly why political consultants deployed by the Congress or non-BJP aligned parties are less likely to be ideologically aligned rather than those deployed or maintained in-house by the BJP.

To be sure, what has also happened is that political consultants are being used by Congress’s regional level leadership to promote their own factional interests in electoral or organizational battles rather than put the best foot forward for the party as a whole. 2023 Rajasthan elections are a good example of this where electoral consultants were used to window-dress what was an extremely divided party although with not a very bad record in governance. It was local level anti-incumbency which hurt the party more than anything else. This is just an example of what is a structural rather than a person-centric problem.

While it is tempting to ascribe this as a major reason for the BJP’s success and Congress’s failure to deploy ideologically inclined political consultancy either during elections or otherwise, there is good reason why this should be seen as a much larger political hiatus between the elite and non-BJP parties at the national level than just affecting the relationship between political parties and consultants. If the status-quo of an elite political class using welfare to legitimise its political appeal is to continue, a large part of the elite, except maybe states such as Tamil Nadu, will not have the superstructural-ideological incentive to do business with parties other than the BJP. Even an ideologically promiscuous approach might not be adequate here in the medium to long-term. AAP’s largely middle class driven defeat in Delhi in a good example of this.

For parties such as the Congress, a rejuvenation of political fortunes entails reinventing a more radical political appeal than passive delivery of welfare measures sold via electoral consultants. This might do away with the need for political consultants but it would require developing an organic, more radical grass root leadership in the course of reimagined class struggle and could potentially usher in a period of political chaos rather than electoral victories.

The growing importance of the tribe of technocratic backroom managers in Indian politics is, to my mind, nothing more than an attempt to make a moribund political economy look more animated. Concerns or celebrations of this phenomenon are only looking at the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of