Democratic Institutions

Perils of Outsourcing Political Work to Election Strategy Firms  Shubham Sharma 08 May 2022 https://www.newsclick.in/perils-outsourcing-political-work-election-strategy-firms 
The elephant in the boardroom where election strategy firms meet with the top leaders of political outfits is the corporate funding of political parties.

The mode of operation of PK and I-PAC primarily entails working with big data, collating facts from the ground, measuring the popularity of the party or leader it has signed up and streamlining its campaign as and where it seems to nosedive. A modus operandi that I witnessed during the Bengal elections last year was the swift movement of PK’s men in constituencies and passing suggestions about the candidate to the high command directly, bypassing the local leadership, not to speak of people.

organisations like I-PAC and individuals in PK’s mould have the capacity to rig Indian representative democracy in favour of parties with big money. Their fee is bound to be astronomical, an estimate of which can be found from the annual turnover of I-PAC. It stood at Rs. 1,032,170,361 (roughly Rs. 100 crores) in 2021, and the salaries of the three directors totalled Rs. 2.67 crores.

Since most political parties raise most of their money from corporate donations, we can see an umbilical link between the corporate pluriverse and politics. It is not that such links did not exist before the rise of electoral strategising firms. The latter’s rise increased the magnitude of the involvement of moneybags in elections.

corporate style strategising also brings the capitalist neo-liberal project to fruition. For the common person, who has already been atomised and alienated under neo-liberalism, elections are generally an opportunity to make maximum demands on the political parties jostling for their votes. The prospect seems lost because of pithy bylines and (un)witty bromides that election strategists coin. Politics seems to revolve around the banalities of Chai pe Charcha and Nitish Ka Nischay, which are flashed 24x7 on television screens, the internet, hoardings, and placards, closing the door for genuine demands and slogans raised by the masses.

 post-ideological political minimalism becomes the order of the day. Since electoral strategising by firms revolves around crude money, the ideological foundations of the polity take a back seat. Services are available for a communal BJP and those contesting it politically. Class-oriented demands such as raising the floor wage and ensuring a minimum Rs. 25,000 wage—a long-time demand of the Left and allied trade unions—are never suggested as possible programmes of action by the political outfits.