Sonia Gandhi's election campaign: It is a spectacle from start to end

Marketing Success: From the moment she steps off the helicopter (in Medak), Sonia's campaign is orchestrated to evoke emotionsIt is a political opera put on wings. The diva has her lines written by an army of librettists. The score changes subtly with the venue. The language shifts from spaghetti English to accented Hindi, with a sprinkling of greetings in the local dialect.The on-stage acts - including a few bouts of furious waving with the elbow pointing to the far right - are simple and done with metronomic regularity. The show goes on with clockwork precision to scan the country, as it has been doing from Sriperumbudur on January 11, until the curtain is rung down in the vicinity of Calcutta on February 26.Sonia Gandhi, the Congress' newest and arguably the country's most visible political idol, would have touched down on 138 helipads and landing strips, stretching from the tea gardens of Assam to the sand dunes of Rajasthan, the temple towns of Tamil Nadu to the ravines of Madhya Pradesh. Before the show ends, she will grandstand before some 15 million people, or over a quarter of the population of Italy, the country of her birth. So will daughter Priyanka and son Rahul, who escort their mother in turns, with son-in-law Robert Vadra making the occasional guest appearance. At the end of the show, the Congress would have spent up to Rs 10 crore on "flying visits'', publicity material and on organising rallies, not to speak of the crores of rupees spent by the states on providing her security cover.Name-Dropping: Sonia's appeal is built on the people's familiarity with Indira and RajivPolls '98 have indeed been billed as a family affair and the AICC headquarters at 24 Akbar Road has become the backyard for 10 Janpath, where the strategy is formulated. In her bid to put the brakes on the BJP, Sonia is marketing the dynasty aggressively.In Sriperumbudur, where she first set foot on a political stage, she made 40 references to Indira Gandhi and Rajiv, the children and her widowhood and only six references to the Congress. Similarly, in Bhubaneswar, the family's sacrifices and "devotion" to India were pointed out 23 times, while the party solicited five mentions. Later in Delhi, Sonia recalled the family and its martyrs 20 times.The family is not new to barnstorming. In 1979, Indira stormed through even the remotest corners to regain power. In 1991, Rajiv flew electoral sorties to the point of diminishing returns, until those were interrupted by his tragic assassination. But Sonia's campaign is different. It is a spectacle from start to end, a great marketing blitz with every selling spiel crafted by a battery of spin doctors. It is also the crossing of a barrier of unfamiliarity. Indira and Rajiv were familiar faces. Sonia is an unknown prima donna who descends on the centrestage of politics for a performance where women cry unabashedly when she talks of her lonely existence and others gawk at the "white woman" speaking Hindi. For the curious crowds which have been attending the cleverly devised election jamborees, Sonia is striking different poses. In Sriperumbudur, she was the grieving widow. A week later, in Bangalore, she was an aggressive champion of the family, thumping the desk in defence of her husband over Bofors. In Chandigarh, she expressed regret, however belatedly, for Operation Bluestar, in an effort to write a new chapter in the family's chequered relationship with the Sikhs. In Delhi, where she caused a flutter among sticklers for political norms by calling Atal Bihari Vajpayee a liar ("Vajpayeeji ne sarasar jhooth bola hai"), it was still a gutsy attempt at giving back what the family got in a tortuous game of mud-slinging. "It is Sonia who is setting the agenda, while the BJP is reacting," says Najma Heptullah, Congress spokesperson who is playing a key role in managing her campaign.Click here to EnlargeSonia's 34-day campaign has as much potential to shoot and scoot as the infamous Bofors gun. About a quarter of the constituencies on her itinerary are purely goodwill missions as the Congress has no chance of winning these seats. A dozen other venues are chosen as part of Sonia's bid to keep important Congress leaders like Girija Vyas, Rajesh Pilot, Tariq Anwar, A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chowdhury and K. Vijayabhaskara Reddy in good humour. The remaining are chosen on the basis of winnability, the party having lost or won these seats by narrow margins in the last election. Says Jairam Ramesh, another crucial member of the campaign team: "We are zeroing in on places where the Congress needs only a gentle swing to stay at the top or to get there."Will Sonia's flying visits bring about the required swings? Besides, in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress had finished in the third or even the fourth place, her visit may simply help the BJP to forge ahead or reestablish its supremacy at the cost of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo Prasad Yadav, both potential post-poll allies of the Congress. So isn't her campaign in a way undermining the party's future bargaining power? Ramesh quotes former British prime minister Harold Wilson who said in politics "a week is too long a time", while Heptullah says the campaign is woven around the "emotion" of the election and not its "arithmetic". While the answer will be known after March 2, the party, which seemed immobilised just six weeks ago, has gained a new momentum. "Soniaji has made the party battle-ready," says AICC General Secretary Oscar Fernandes. Regardless of whether or not it wins the "battle", Sonia's managers are working overtime to craft a new persona for their leader. The "speech factory" operates like a machine. Click here to EnlargeFirst, there is an "input department" that collates constituency-specific information - from the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC), the relevant District Congress Committee (DCC), and senior state leaders. The vital elements are: the cultural background of the area, its relationship with the Gandhi-Nehru family, the present political context and problems, if any.Sonia's campaign managers say there are streams of unsolicited inputs, though these are mostly junked by the "processing unit", which includes, besides Ramesh, Heptullah, former MP Balkavi Bairagi, AICC Joint Secretary Janardhan Dwivedi and politician-journalist Udayan Sharma. They hand over the raw draft to the "output team", comprising Sonia and Priyanka. A family friend gives the final draft a once-over. The real authorship of the text lies with the mother-daughter duo. Priyanka is adept at penning "killer phrases", such as the BJP being "afraid of a woman" ("Dar gaye, ek aurat se dar gaye"). If she is less visible on stage, it is because she is working 12 hours a day, drafting speeches. Most of the inputs are, in fact, marked to Priyanka who even on February 18 - her first wedding anniversary - was busy at 10 Janpath, writing speeches while mother and brother were on the stump. According to her brother-in-law Richard Vadra, "Coming from this family, Priyanka is fully aware of her responsibility and will become the prime minister one day." He is even quoted as saying that Rahul, who is at present deeply involved with his mother's campaign, will "settle abroad".Though Priyanka draws a more enthusiastic response than Rahul, she is off stage because she is the one who thinks up the punch lines. Sonia has a flair for the emotional fireworks. The sorry-for-Bluestar theme, first suggested by Manmohan Singh, was converted by Sonia into the rhetorical counterpart of a full-throated aria. Besides, the common thread that runs through her speeches comprises the anti-communalist (longhand for anti-BJP) fusillades, an emphasis on education and a focus on women's issues. There is, of course, the emotional clincher: "Mere pati ki hatya ke baad, meri zindagi choor choor ho gayee." Rajiv had turned speech-drafting into a complex system with a conveyor belt of information bytes that passed through his friends in the government - Suman Dubey, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Gopi Arora, Sarla Grewal and, at a later stage, Ramesh. Sonia has changed the people here and there, making it somewhat more broad-based, but the assembly line approach is unchanged.Keeping in Touch: Rahul Gandhi is a vital player in the dynasty-centred jamboreeThe induction of party leaders into the input brigade has brought a dose of ethnicity. For Sonia's speech at Nandurbar in Maharashtra, Sharad Pawar suggested a reference to Sirish Kumar, a youth killed by the British police during the freedom movement.It had an electrifying effect on the audience. For the January 15 speech at Ernakulam in Kerala, Congress stalwart A.K. Antony suggested a mention of Adi Shankara and Sree Narayana Guru. At Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, Sonia got a big hand when she paid tribute - at the PCC's behest - to the Rohilla Pathans who played a big role in the 1857 uprising. The speech was laced with dollops of Islamic civilities ("Aapka shukriya adaa karti hoon"). However quaint the Urdu may have sounded, there were roars of appreciation from a rural audience that adores dynasties. In most north Indian constituencies, Sonia's Hindustani created a curiosity so overpowering that nobody noticed that Hindutva was pronounced as "Indutva" and that her 'ths and 'ds were guttural and lacked Hindustani sibilancy. "Soniaji can at least read her speech; Deve Gowda couldn't utter a word in Hindi," says Dildar Miyan, a Congress election committee member at Rampur. The Sonia brigade is assessing the aerial showcasing of the family as watchfully as brand managers before the launch of a global brand. Collating region-wise "talking points'' is a team of Youth Congress members who work out of Heptullah's home, poring through the Encyclopaedia of India and the Who's Who of the country's martyrs. Members of the party and of Newswatch - the division monitoring media coverage - have been spreading themselves over different venues to assess the impact. They are picking up feedback in the local media ("Did Vajpayee smile better than Sonia?"), listening in on crowd responses, and are videotaping the proceedings for post mortem of the crowd size, even the cheer lines. Heptullah, for instance, sat in the women's enclosure at the Delhi meeting on February 13 and Tom Vadakkan of the media committee provided the feedback on her Kochi meeting. Son-in-law Robert was dropped from the Sonia entourage after three appearances because of a negative feedback. Sonia is so media-conscious that she has a team to analyse critical stories appearing in the press. Though accused of shying away from the press, she is also known to allow "courtesy calls" by "friendly" journalists.Striking Images: From bereaved widow to patriotic leader, Sonia plays her part wellSonia's target audience is restricted to crowds rather than poll partners. Congress leaders are bewildered at her determination to attack all non-Congress parties, regardless of post-poll consequences.In Salem, she attacked those who "have joined hands with the ones who ... had facilitated the assassination of my husband". The reference to the Tamil Maanila Congress was clear. In Calcutta, she attacked 20 years of Left Front rule and in Andhra Pradesh she took on the "regional parties". Many Congress leaders believe that Sonia is not being politically savvy, concentrating, as she is, only on the family. Others believe she is really looking to the next election when her hold over the Congress is total. For the moment, she is only concerned with the Congress emerging as the single largest party.In any case, the secret of the marketing marathon lies in Sonia's total inaccessibility to the crowds and the party. As the unofficial supremo of the Congress since 1991, she has always been hemmed in by a wall of silence. The campaign has now opened a few windows on the wall, offering measured glimpses of her landing at whistle-stop destinations, climbing the high podium rather jauntily, and delivering a speech in which she berates, raises questions and delivers one-liners. Then she is back in the aircraft, and onward to a new destination, a new people and a new language.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Mar 2, 1998 00:00 IST--- ENDS ---

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Sonia Gandhi's election campaign: It is a spectacle from start to end

Sonia Gandhi's campaign is different. It is a spectacle from start to end, a great marketing blitz with every selling spiel crafted by a battery of spin doctors. Sonia markets Gandhi dynasty; makes more references to Indira Gandhi and Rajiv, her children and widowhood than to the Congress.

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