Call Centre For Akhilesh Yadav Dials Voters, But Doesn't Say It's For Him

Lukcnow: "Hello sir, I am calling from a media house," says a young woman hunched over a phone in Lucknow. Nearly 70 others packed into the non-descript three-storey house in a quiet Lucknow suburb are making similar introductions. At the other end of the line are voters, or village-level influencers, who the callers hope to win over in support of their client, Akhilesh Yadav. Except they have been told by their team leaders not to introduce themselves as representatives of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, who is hunting re-election.

Instead, they say they represent a Delhi-based media house, and that they are conducting a poll survey. Built into their questions and conversations, however, is an attempt to gauge whether specific caste and community groups in a particular village or booth are inclined in favour of or against Akhilesh Yadav.

Information about "trouble spots" is fed to a network of 700 on-ground operatives whose task is to visit those problem areas to try and subtly tilt opinion in Akhilesh Yadav's favour, again without stating explicitly that they are working for him.

This strategy - of a sort of hidden persuasion - has been crafted for Akhilesh Yadav from thousands of miles away by Steve Jarding, a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Governance.

One of his students, a young man called Advait Vikram Singh, introduced Professor Jarding to Mr Yadav in August; since then, the American has helped devise the Chief Minister's strategy, including through his volcanic feud with his father, Mulayam Singh. It was Professor Jarding's advice that some hold responsible for Akhilesh Yadav's decision to build the UP campaign around himself as a pro-development leader transcending caste boundaries. "This was Steve's personal assessment: that Akhilesh Yadav should be the message himself," Advait Vikram Singh told NDTV.

Meanwhile in the backrooms, like the one we were given access to, is the less visible work of micromanaging caste dynamics, still inseparable from any election in the Hindi heartland.

"Sir, the Koeris - who are they supporting the most in your village?" asks Pammi, one of the women in the makeshift call centre, referring to one of UP's myriad backward caste groups.

The data bank of phone numbers and caste data which the young callers are working off come from Avnish Kumar Rai, a partner of Advait Vikram Singh, someone who told us he's been in the business of campaign management for close to three decades. "I want to know why a particular group is against us. We have a lot of leaders in the Samajwadi Party from various castes. Once we find out (a problem), we ask them to convince their fellow community members," said Mr Rai, who is in his mid-40s.

We asked Mr Singh and Mr Rai whether this model is borrowed from the template of election micro-management pioneered, to great success, by the BJP President Amit Shah. The BJP's landslide win in UP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections is partly credited to Mr Shah's efforts, and to a corporate-style campaign crafted by the election strategist Prashant Kishor (who now works with the Congress).

But Mr Rai said, "We won't have to beat him (Amit Shah). The BJP will lose on its own. Our surveys have found that in 287 seats (of a total of 403), the fight for the BJP has become incredibly tough."