2019: How Modi Won India by RAJDEEP SARDESAI

Author:RAJDEEP SARDESAI [SARDESAI, RAJDEEP]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2019-11-25T18:30:00+00:00

State elections ahead of a big general election year are usually seen as crucial in building momentum for the major political parties. However, the 2018 assembly election battles weren’t just about energizing the party cadres for the Congress; it was literally make-or-break time for the grand old party. At the start of the year, the Congress was in power in just three states – Punjab, Karnataka and Mizoram – and the union territory of Puducherry. Two of these states, Karnataka and Mizoram, were among the six going to the assembly polls, as were the large Hindi-belt states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and the southern state of Telangana. The Congress desperately needed to win at least three of these combats, especially those with the BJP in the Hindi heartland. ‘We knew that if we lost these elections we might as well give up the 2019 war,’ a member of Rahul’s team tells me.

The Congress by now was frantic. Nervousness and anxiety prevailed at all levels and the party even considered hiring a foreign political consultant, Steve Jarding, a well-regarded Harvard University professor, to manage its campaign. Rahul had met Jarding along with Sam Pitroda in London in August 2018, and was impressed enough to ask him to get in touch with the party’s think tank. In an email (seen by this author), Jarding speaks of how he is ‘very keen’ to work with the Congress but that the party must take a decision soon because ‘time is very short’ and a ‘large campaign needs to be mounted’. ‘We didn’t go ahead with it in the end because Jarding was asking for too much money,’ claims a senior Congress leader. (A fee upwards of 1 million USD was reportedly asked for.) That Jarding was even being spoken to with just six months left for the elections suggests a vote of no-confidence in the existing election management team, and confusion and lack of resolve in planning and strategy on the part of the Congress.

It wasn’t just Jarding. Just a year earlier, in July 2017, Cambridge Analytica (CA), a British political consulting firm which combined data mining and analysis with strategic communication, met Rahul in Delhi and offered a multi-million dollar proposal to handle the Congress campaign. A three-member CA team headed by CEO Alexander Nix was asked to meet Jairam Ramesh and take the discussions forward. Once again, the Congress hesitated because of a funds crunch. In early 2018, the organization found itself embroiled in a global political scandal when it was revealed that CA had harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political advertising in the 2015 US senate elections and 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Nix was suspended from CA in March 2018 after undercover video footage showed him claiming his company was using honey traps, bribery stings and prostitutes, among other tactics, to influence more than 200 elections for clients across the world. ‘I guess we just got lucky in

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