Message Matters, Not Just Method; So Don’t Hang Prashant Kishor For Rahul Gandhi’s Flop Show In UP

One myth that is likely to die an unsung death is that the victories of Narendra Modi in 2014, Nitish Kumar in 2015, and now Amarinder Singh in Punjab were the result of smart, tech-savvy strategists helping politicians turn the tide in their favour. The truth is smart political strategists are necessary to amplify messages, but it is the messages that need to be smart, not just the strategies for dissemination. What wins is the quality of the message, or the appeal of the messenger, not the man trying to disseminate it.

This much should be apparent from the drubbing the Congress and Samajwadi Party got in Uttar Pradesh (UP), despite having Prashant Kishor on their side. Kishor was widely credited with making the Modi magic work in 2014, and was miffed when the Modi government did not have a job for him post the May victory.

After leaving the Modi camp, where he was not missed, he joined Nitish Kumar in Bihar, and helped him win big in 2015. But in UP he came a cropper. He can certainly claim some credit for the Congress win in Punjab, but Capt Amrinder Singh was not willing to give Kishor too much credit. He admitted graciously in an interview to The Times of India that “Prashant Kishor is the one who put our strategy in place. But it is not that Congress was sleeping and he worked. We were working as hard.”

Quite. It is neither fair to think of Kishor as the cat’s whiskers, nor as a dud, judging purely by the results achieved. Winning or losing depends on the quality of the message and/or the messenger, not the amplification of the message. A bad message suitably amplified will bring defeat faster, as was the case with the Congress in Uttar Pradesh.

In UP, Kishor first got the brainwave of making Rahul Gandhi the chief ministerial candidate, with Priyanka Vadra being the chief campaigner. The party balked at the idea of letting their heir apparent take on this risk, which could well have dented Rahul Gandhi’s reputation further. Now at least he can blame the SP alliance or polarisation for the failure.

Then he had the idea that Congress must woo back the Brahmin vote, and here the party obliged by announcing Sheila Dikshit as its chief ministerial face. But when this idea saw no traction, Kishor pushed for a Congress-SP alliance, which went down in flames as the only plus in the alliance was Akhilesh Yadav’s acceptable face. The Akhilesh-Rahul youthful combo was supposed to enthuse young voters while also consolidating the Muslim vote, but this strategy fell flat when all it led to was a reverse polarisation of the non-Yadav Hindu vote in favour of the BJP. Brahmins could not have been happy that Dikshit was dumped unceremoniously when the strategy was changed mid-course.

The BJP, despite lacking a chief ministerial face, managed to use Modi’s personal charisma and the prospect of the non-Yadav Hindus sharing power in a future BJP government as its central message. In contrast, the Akhilesh-led SP could only promise more Yadav domination, even though his actual message was aspirational rather than narrow. The message may have worked if he had broken with the old guard inside the SP a year earlier, so that he could have truly claimed that Kam bolta hai. But he split the party too late, and his tie-up with Congress appeared too opportunistic to work. The overt message was okay, but the underlying message was opportunistic. There was little a Prashant Kishor could do when the message and the messengers were discordant.

In contrast, the BJP, which did not give a single ticket to Muslims, gave the maximum numbers of seats to non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits. It was a message of empowerment of the hitherto disempowered under the banner of wider Hindu consolidation. Narendra Modi’s own rise to the Prime Ministership from an underprivileged caste embodied this same empowerment.

The message, the messenger, and the nuances of the messaging coalesced to give the BJP a win. So don’t hang Prashant Kishor for leading Congress to the scrapyard in UP. He did not bring Modi victory in 2014, or Nitish in 2015. He cannot be blamed for Rahul Gandhi’s follies in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. He had a shoddy product to sell, and the customer refused to buy.