How to win an Indian election: What political parties don’t want you to know – Shivam Shankar Singh Penguin/Ebury press Rs.240, Pages 201 Shivam Shankar Singh’s How to Win an Indian Election is an insider’s candid account of how political parties leverage voters’ data and digital technologies for political campaigning. Singh headed data analytics and campaigns for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the Manipur and Tripura legislative assembly elections under the guidance of the party’s national general secretary, Ram Madhav. By sharing insights as a former BJP data and campaign analyst, Singh spotlights the scale, impact and consequences of digital campaigning for micro-targeting voters. It helps one understand, to some extent, the role of data and new-age technology in the recently concluded General Election 2019 which the BJP won with a landslide majority. How to win an Indian election starts with the aspiration of the author to do good for his country. He sees much value in returning to India from the US — under a LAMP fellowship — to serve the country by engaging with members of Parliament on policy matters. This phase in his life and career is marked by an “obsessive desire to learn about the Indian political landscape and the people who populate it”. After the fellowship ended, Singh joined the Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC), a company run by political strategist Prashant Kishor who had masterminded Narendra Modi’s prime ministerial campaign in 2014. Kishor backs campaigns that have a leading face. He believes this approach connects with the public and is more marketable, especially in a country where citizens yearn to follow a supreme leader. In 2014 India had grown tired of Congress nepotism and corruption. This made it easier for Modi and his team to present the persona of a strong leader for the country. Singh learned much under Kishor’s leadership before moving to work directly for the BJP under Madhav’s guidance. Comparing politics to entrepreneurship, Singh says that in the absence of data and privacy regulations in India, political parties easily access and play around with personal data of social media users — all without users’ knowledge, let alone permission. Through personal anecdotes, Singh discloses how data analysts, supported by sophisticated technology, assist political parties to reach their audiences, map their identities, monetise their emotions, and capture their votes. According to the author, in many large Indian states, the caste and religion of over 70 percent of the people can be determined by analysing their names, which are publicly available on electoral rolls. Based on this and other information gathered by them, political parties use fake news and propaganda on social media to shape — or rather manipulate — voters’ minds through targeted profiling. For those who’ve read Swati Chaturvedi’s I Am a Troll, the revelations in How to Win an Indian Election won’t come as a surprise, especially since Singh doesn’t write much about organised disinformation or misinformation or the source of it. The book does, however, reveal the functioning of BJP’s…
