70 PARLIAMENTARIAN l JULY 201901
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he worked out of modi’s
residence in gandhinagar
but has another eight
offices across the country
he made modi read an
old interview 30
times to prepare for
the 2014 elections
his one audacious demand
is that he should be
accessible 24X7 to the
leader he works for
now he is taking up the
onerous task of keeping
mamata Banerjee in
power in west Bengal
snapshots
politics|personality
e
LECTION strategist Prashant Kishor has single-handedly
changed the way elections are being held in India. Post 2012,
he helped Narendra Modi get re -elected as chief minister to
Gujarat for the third time. He then went on to create a
Citizen for Accountable Governance (CAG) group that
helped the BJP and more specifi cally Modi win power at the centre in 2014.
Th e strategy employed to catapult Modi to power in 2014 laid out a template
for all our subsequent elections. Following the 2012 Gujarat state elections,
Kishore went on to create a mammoth electioneering team of professionals
that saw winning seats as a project-management challenge away from the
way elections had been held earlier, where work was overseen by local satraps
and part-time volunteers. Th ese professionals did not hesitate to use a vast
armoury of weapons including campaign analytics, social media, technology,
and campaign management.
Of course, the fall out of using top-of-the-line professionals to provide
inputs and oversee every detail of electioneering has seen the cost of
electioneering sky rocket. It was therefore no shocker when one learnt that
the Centre for Media Studies calculated the cost of the 2019 Lok Sabha
elections as having been over Rs 60,000 crore. Th e 2019 elections have been
found to be the most expensive elections held anywhere in the world trumping
even the cost of the US presidential election of 2016.
In his earlier avatar, Kishor repeatedly assured his critics that none of the
members of his team were attached to any political party. Th ey in factrasHMe seHgaL
Rashme Sehgal began her career
as a poet-cum-short story writer
in 1970s. She then shifted to
journalism and worked with several
leading newspapers including The
Independent, The Telegraph and
The Times of India