Congress hiring strategists for Haryana polls
In the past, too, the Congress has used the services of election specialists, but with mixed results.
The Indian National Congress is in the process of recruiting “campaign strategists” for the Haryana Assembly elections that are scheduled for September 2019. The advertisement for the positions was recently shared online by Bhavya Bishnoi, son of Congress leader Kuldeep Bishnoi and grandson of former Haryana stalwart Bhajan Lal.
Bhavya, 25, who is a graduate from the London School of Economics, and is looking after the recruitment drive, said that they were looking to build an inhouse think-tank of young individuals who can come up with out- of- box ideas that will be used during the election campaigning.
“Despite not advertising it very widely, we have received close to 600 applications. The selected candidates will start working from July. They will be posted across Haryana, including Hisar (represented by his father in last Lok Sabha) and will help the party in campaigning,” Bhavya told The Sunday Guardian.
Bhavya, who has been involved in campaigning for his father in the past, was included in the list of Haryana delegates in All India Congress Committee (AICC) that was released a few months ago.
As per the advertisement, the campaign strategists will design developmental and social impact projects, conduct primary research to identify policy and developmental gaps, develop electoral campaign manifesto, come up with innovative campaign slogans and ideas, introduce important points for speeches and debates, develop campaign narratives and strategies apart from conducting research and write bi-monthly articles on important national and state policy issues.
In the past, too, the Congress has used the services of election specialists but with mixed results. The party had used the services of Indian Political Action Committee ( I-PAC), owned by election strategist Prashant Kishor, for the Punjab elections last year, which it won. However, the private agency was unable to deliver the kind of results that the party was looking for in UP, though the elections there were held simultaneously with Punjab.
Talking to this correspondent, an AICC functionary said that there was nothing wrong if party leaders were availing the service of campaign specialists at the state level. “We have done this in the past in UP and Punjab and now it has become the norm with virtually every party using campaign managers. A candidate cannot focus on everything while campaigning in his constituency. There are so many things he has to take care of like ensuring his visibility in the media, presence in the social media, content of his speech, etc. Hence, there is no harm if leaders use specialists,” he explained, requesting anonymity.
According to him, this has been a topic of discussion among the party leaders for some time now. Many ticket aspirants have already been doing this at their personal level.
“Some senior leaders have engaged such campaign strategists in Madhya Pradesh, too, where they are visiting the constituencies and collecting reports regarding their image among the voters, their competitors and the level of anti-incumbency sentiments, if any, prevailing against the sitting BJP MLA there,” he added. Assistant professor Dr Pravesh Kumar, who is a faculty member in the Centre for Comparative Politics & Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University ( JNU), has slammed the “antiIndia forces” operating from the JNU campus and has alleged that these groups were feeling threatened because their foreign funding has been stopped by the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA government. Dr Kumar is a Dalit scholar belonging to Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh.
Giving the example of Rona Wilson, a former student of JNU, who has been recently arrested by the Maharashtra police for his alleged involvement with Maoist organisations, Kumar said that for decades the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus has served as a fertile ground for anti-India activities and such forces carry out their activities under the garb of bringing social justice.
“These people talk about bringing social justice while living a lavish life, wearing branded clothes and holidaying in foreign countries. Someone needs to ask them that with the kind of salary that they get as professors in JNU, how they manage to go so frequently on foreign holidays. All this comes from foreign funding and since the present Narendra Modi government has clamped down on NGOs and organisations through which they are funded, they are attacking the government,” Dr Kumar said.
According to him, though these “tukde-tukde” gang claims to work for Dalits and accuse the government of being anti-Dalit, it is the present government which had done the maximum work for Dalits. “The present government has brought Dalits into the mainstream. So many heroes whose names were forgotten in history have been resurrected by this government. So many roads of JNU have been named in the names of Indian heroes. This did not happen before,” he said.
He alleged that certain professors of the Jawaharlal Nehru University were conducting researches in their private capacities, earning huge sums of money, but were using the facilities provided by the government. “They do not give back anything to the government. They are misusing the facilities provided to them. Now, this government is taking steps to stop this, which has angered the Left-leaning professors who used to have a monopoly here,” he said.
“Earlier, only those students who subscribed to the Leftist ideology were able to live on this campus. All others were harassed. Now this is changing and more and more students who support the right, national thinking are becoming vocal,” Kumar said.