DR. SPIN IN SHINING INDIA

Published in International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics (2005), 1(3), 314-319.

ABSTRACT
The “India Shining” campaign represents the biggest mediated political campaign in India until its time. This promotional campaign by the NDA coalition government of India in 2004 adopted and created a complementary and dialectical “articulation/silence” relationship between source and receiver. As this critique reveals, the eventual defeat of NDA in the national elections partly reflects the failure of the articulated messages to produce influential meanings, and the voters’ active reactions to the articulation based on comparisons between propaganda and reality.

DR. SPIN IN SHINING INDIA: ARTICULATION AND SILENCE, IMAGE AND REALITY IN THE 2004 POLITICAL CAMPAIGN

Although it has been widely debated in corporate and journalistic circles, the Indian government’s “India Shining” mediated election campaign of 2004 has not been evaluated for the relationship between the mediated messages in the campaign and human feedback. Simply put, why did it fail?


Features of the campaign

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government commissioned the $22 million India Shining campaign in 2003 to Grey Worldwide, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. The campaign ran from February 2004 until two days before the national elections in May. Although it was strategically timed before the national elections in May 2004, its main proclaimed agenda was to create a “feel-good factor” about the country among Indian businesses and people at large.

The strategy was to spread persuasive messages through all strata of the society through a media mix of newspapers, magazines and news television. Newspapers, news channels and news portals later picked up the term “India Shining” and used it in various relevant and irrelevant contexts of news items — consciously or unconsciously either endorsing or criticizing the campaign. The ads resembled any well-made campaign for a product or service. Reflecting energy, sparkling health and contentment, the campaign’s advertisements could easily be mistaken for promotions for health food: Images of a class full of eager children who have all the answers to the teacher’s questions, an old Kashmiri man who smiles at his just-plucked lotus buds, a woman playing cricket with her children and their friends in the backyard. The effort was to accomplish maximum possible reach, and to universalize even local issues. The campaign aspired to convey a positive reality, reflected in the ad’s sparkle of hopeful, simple yet meaningful faces content with their world —diverse yet unified. Implied is the relationship between the government as a platform for achieving dreams, and aspirant individuals across the country.

Support and criticism

Many columnists were all praise for the campaign and saw it as a clear image of reality. One Rediff-Online columnist noted euphorically: “Atal Bihari Vajpayee's most enduring achievement is that he has brought laughter and hope back into the life of India. The sentiment is not universal but it is the dominant theme in a diverse country. The media is merely mirroring this age of happiness” (Dasgupta, 2003). Critics of the campaign hinted the ad campaign was propaganda. A week before elections, critical left-wingers commented: “The slick advertising of the ‘India Shining’ campaign cannot hide the fact that the deepening social divide between rich and poor will have explosive political consequences” (Zora & Woreck, 2004). Former Indian Prime Minister (Indian National Congress, the longtime ruling party), the late P.V. Narasimha Rao, declared that “If you don’t have an ideology or a programme to match [a campaign], you will have to resort to hype before polls” (NDTV, May 12, 2004).

Grey’s billing to the government was nearly one percent of the overall advertising expenditures in India (Singh, 2004). Never before had a government in India used the media so aggressively to its political advantage; never had a mediated political campaign of this magnitude been professionally handled. While there had been several smaller campaigns in the past, handled mostly by in-house communication experts or by small media buying agencies, officially, there had never been a mediated political campaign of this magnitude.

In July 2004, Grey’s South Asia chairman admitted, “I think we [would be] foolish to believe that in a country where there are crores and crores [tens of millions] of illiterate people that an advertising campaign can make or break a government … [But] did the people notice the communication? The answer is yes” (Singh, 2004).

Political dynamics

The government started its campaign with an ideology which it set out to achieve in order to satisfy the volcanic (right-wing) hardliners. Having drawn a circle of pro-Hindu ideology, the government was anxious to propagate the economic gains during its period, reflected in a stock market boom from international investments and a positive market sentiment. However, almost a third of the 1.2 billion people in India live below the poverty line and were presumably uninfluenced by the market boom in any perceptible way. The 13 percent Muslims were not impressed either. Propaganda often finds its nemesis in elections, and the power of the ballot box was a handy weapon for a nation that had witnessed horrors and dilemmas: the Gujarat massacre , the continuing controversy about Ayodhya (the seat of an ancient Muslim shrine that was torn down in 1992 by militant RSS-led Hindus), murders of Christian priests, “saffronization” of history books , and the rise of religious extremism in general. The governance occurred during a period that saw the maximum 5-year growth of disparity between the poor and rich in India. Big jobs were restricted to the urban, young upwardly mobile. Muslim and Christian minorities felt threatened by the pro-majority ruling government. There are more than 40 million unemployed people in India. Factors such as these could have hardly helped the India Shining campaign.

As a litmus test of voter maturity, the India Shining campaign resulted in the triumph of the people, which lay in their ability to recognize propaganda. That critical dialectic forms the crux of this paper’s argument. For the sake of simplicity, I will consider only the mediated part of the India Shining campaign.

The government alliance was led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which has promoted Hindu nationalism since 1925. The BJP, the major party in the NDA coalition, is in many ways an antithesis to the Congress party, which ruled over India for 42 out of 48 years after India’s independence from the British in 1947. (The Congress lost the 1996 elections to the BJP-led alliance.) The BJP aligned itself with the hard-line Hindutva (“Spirit of Hinduism”) movement, and its leaders became known for making inflammatory remarks about minority religions. Before the general elections concluded in May 2004, most exit and opinion polls predicted a clear majority for the BJP and its possible allies:

TV channels’ predictions
BJP & allies: 263-275 (Star News); 263-278 (Sahara Samay); 263-275 (Zee News-Taleem); 249 (TV Today)

Congress & allies : 174-186 (Star News); 171-181 (Sahara Samay); 174-186 (Zee News-Taleem); 191 (TV Today)


However, exit polls conducted by The Indian Express (IE) daily and New Delhi Television (NDTV) channel indicated that the NDA would fail to make the magical 260 mark – the minimum number of Members of Parliament hopefuls from that party required to avoid a hung Parliament (The Indian Express, May 11, 2004). They got closer to the truth than anyone else.

The articulation/silence dialectic

Stuart Hall (1988) and other scholars have contended that thought gains endorsement through discourse and articulation. Articulated thought survives and percolates. The India Shining campaign may be a perfect example of the power of articulation and more significantly, of silence (lack of articulation, deliberate or forced) in that silent voter action defeated the expected consequence of articulation. The campaign’s messages did not resonate with the average Indian, who then used the feedback mechanism — in this case, the right to vote the government out.

What were the dominant meanings embedded in the India Shining campaign? Advertisers have thrived on the psycho-centric presumption that buyer decisions are positively impacted by repeat (hence reinforcement and recall) value. The pattern of media use, therefore, could be a major catalyst in media influence. As a socializing agent, the media created what George Gerbner, the cultivation theory proponent, calls “mainstreaming” (Gerbner, et al, 1980). But despite the images created, it was voter behavior that finally undid the influential campaign that was effective in creating a “perception” . The inherent power of interpretation of the messages triumphed again when the campaign failed to achieve its goal — to reinforce a “feel good factor” about the nation’s buoyancy. As voters verified generalized images with personal realities, the India Shining campaign failed to accomplish that objective.

One of the main problems with the India Shining campaign was the ambivalence it created between source-as-government and source-as-political campaigner. Complexity arises from the campaign that targeted largely the news media. There was confusion between messages-as-information and messages-as-promotion. ‘The bills were paid by the Government of India … So why people have mistaken “India Shining” for [the] BJP, I have no idea’ (Singh, 2004). The perception by the public of any distinction between promotion as propaganda and promotion as public interest gets murkier with the attempts by spin doctors to blur the very difference between promotion and information.


Conclusion

If the India Shining campaign articulated to create an image, the reality that citizens experienced was by and large different from that image. The image emerged not from the world of Indian society but from the “other”, more urbane world of marketing and advertising, and was ultimately doomed to encounter, not dialogue (and therefore reinforcement), but silence and simple rejection.

The India Shining campaign seemed to be an attempt to replace the image of a scam-ridden, sulking, poverty-beleaguered nation with that of an economically stable, competitive nation where investment would rake in returns. I have attempted to explain the boomerang of the India Shining as a result in part of the articulation/silence phenomenon, but a study of what has changed post-India Shining would now be valuable because of the huge possibility of significant changes in media policies by the new government. Already, there are signs of a learning process. One year and several months later, it seems that the government that followed the NDA — the UPA, a coalition between the Indian National Congress and its allies — learned its lesson. The Congress’ election slogan, “Aam aadmi ke saath” (With the Common Man) resonates with UPA’s ongoing “Bharat Nirman” (Building India) project, taking asylum in the all-too-familiar shelter of political ambiguity.


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