Winning the booth: On waterfalls and whispers

Written by: Ritwick Shrivastav—who has been a political consultant with the BJP, AAP, and Congress. He recently founded Prajatantra, a wonderful initiative to empower ordinary Indians to enter electoral politics. If you or anyone you know is interested in contesting elections, please reach out to his team at prajatantramovement@gmail.com

As a political consultant, I am often faced with questions about how and why a particular narrative—be it about a party, caste, community, or individual — becomes so dominant that it is accepted as 'true'. As elections draw closer, you may wonder why certain parties and candidates seem to possess a superior grasp of “public sentiment”, while others are “out of touch”. My answer to all these questions is unequivocal: it all comes down to what is known as ‘booth management’ in the election business.

Let me take you back to the 2004 general elections, when television screens and newspapers were filled with ‘India Shining’ advertisements of the Vajpayee-led NDA government. The campaign rode on India’s urban economic progress, presenting the BJP as a ‘success story’ that ‘got the job done’. Just as we’re seeing in 2024, the incumbent BJP was very confident of its campaign strategy. All that came undone at a seemingly innocuous voxpop at a rally in Haryana, where a lone farmer damningly said,"Desh toh chamak raha hoga, par gareeb ko kya mila?" (“India is shining, but what have the poor received?).   

Back in 2004, there was no Prashant Kishore, Himanshu Singh, or Sunil Kanugolu working for the Congress. Yet, the opposition knew this moment represented a priceless opportunity, and shifted its focus to aggressively highlight rural India’s woes. The Congress tapped into this narrative and masterfully leveraged it at the grassroots level. The astonishing result: Congress and its UPA allies won 225 seats. 

In a country as diverse as India, where regional sentiments, caste dynamics, and local issues play a pivotal role in shaping electoral preferences, effective narratives are necessary to win the day. These do not need to be overarching narratives like ‘gareeb ko kya mila’. Parties just as often use micro-narratives that speak directly to the concerns and aspirations of voters in a particular booth or locality. That’s where booth management is key.

Hang on, but what is a booth?

A polling booth is a designated location where a voter goes to cast their vote during an election. It is set up by the Election Commission of India (ECI). Typically, there are 800 to 1200 voters per polling booth whose names appear on a voter’s roll prepared by the ECI.  

For political parties and consultants, a polling booth is the smallest unit of an election campaign. All parties work to develop a strong booth-level cadre that can together build a national victory. The BJP’s ‘panna pramukh’ system puts one person in charge of one page of an electoral roll (around 60 voters). It is a great example of this kind of micro-management.

The virtuous cycle of campaign management

Booth-level workers are entrusted with more than just campaigning across the homes of their 60 voters. They also monitor these voters’ political leanings, timepass conversations, and aspirations—reporting it to the booth in-charges above them. This feedback is collected and organised–and passed up the hierarchy. At the top, parties use this feedback to craft specific narratives targeted at booths managed by the respective panna pramukh or page in-charges.  

The engine of any election campaign is fueled by that loop—which is often vaguely called ‘grassroots organising’. It is often the difference between victory and defeat. Contrary to common perception, TV news and print media do not ‘make’ or ‘break’ narratives for a national election. In fact, less than half of India even watches television. Narratives are actually formed at the booth level. 

The making of a narrative

At its core, booth management is the art of orchestrating several strategic tasks within individual polling booths. It involves mobilising individual voters, campaigning door-to-door, and the logistics of organising transport—as in an autorickshaw, or sometimes even a bus—to ensure that voters actually vote. Today, data and ground intelligence allows political consultants to identify battleground or competitive booths–those critical to winning a constituency or state.

Consider a constituency like Muzaffarnagar in UP or Karnataka’s Bengaluru Rural. The Muslim population is around 15-20% and religious confrontations are common. In such a setting, groups of villagers would be paid to wear a hijab and stand around the polling station. The aim is to make the swing Hindu voter believe the narrative of “Muslim domination” via “population explosion.” That in turn would spur them to go to the booth and cast a pro-Hindutva vote. Some may find this unethical, but all is fair in love and war… and elections. Right?

But, but, but: Here’s a very important point to remember. Narratives only work when there is some element of truth (or believability). So, the BJP’s narrative of “Hindu khatre me hai” will never work in booths where the Muslim population is extremely low. Every booth’s caste and community demographics are critical to crafting specific narratives that will be effective among its voters. 

Whisper campaigns in rural India

Thanks to the rise of professional consultants in the past decade, the strategy to craft and leverage micro-narratives has become highly sophisticated and organised. The weapons of choice are most often ‘whisper campaigns’ and ‘WhatsApp waterfalls’. 

The term ‘whisper campaign’ refers to the game Chinese Whisper. Specific messages are spread through teams of students or journalists in village hotspots.  These are appropriated, distorted, and repeated amongst locals, Irrespective of whether the information is accurate or logical, as long as there is a sliver of truth, the narrative will have legs–spreading until it becomes a commonly known ‘fact’. 

Here’s a good example from the 2019 General Elections in Uttar Pradesh–where the BJP was struggling to woo Yadavs away from the SP-BSP alliance. The party was struggling to sell the story that upper-caste Yadav pride had been compromised by this alliance with Dalits–and the BJP was poised to lose 30 to 35 seats. Right at that moment, Dimple Yadav (Akhilesh Yadav’s wife) did this—touching Mayawati’s feet on stage during a public rally in Kannauj.

It turbo-charged the BJP narrative. They micro-targeted this narrative at booths that had a significant population of both Yadavs and Dalits living together—where the friction would be the highest. They did not bother with booths that had a greater mix of castes—where garnering added Yadav votes would not make a difference to the winning total. The BJP ended up sweeping Uttar Pradesh, winning a whopping 62 seats out of the 80 available.

WhatsApp waterfalls in urban india

Urban localities present a different problem to campaign strategists. Because booths change from one lane to another, targeting voters using a panna pramukh is inefficient. A single residential colony may have 4-5 booths attached to its 5000 residents. 

Instead, parties and consultancies use digital markers to target voters instead. Social media (23%) and YouTube education/news channels and reels (25%) have overtaken TV news channels as the primary mode of news consumption in cities. At the ground level, the party’s social media and WhatsApp narratives are spread through your next-door neighbours, parents, and even directly through you. If you’ve found yourself privy to dinner table conversations that proclaim “all protesting farmers are Khalistanis”, “urban Naxals study in JNU”, or “Nehru gave up India’s bid to UNSC”, then you may consider yourself marked. 

But these narratives are not always spread directly by the party's official pages or website. Most often, they are received as forwards from innocuous meme channels, news update Telegram groups, or even as ‘good morning’ photos with Lord Krishna’s image. These channels and pages, called “surrogates”, form a formidable network different from Twitter influencers with ‘Modi ka parivar’ or ‘Ab milega nyay’ written on their profiles. Instead, these surrogate WhatsApp group managers first build trust in a not-big-brother manner. They help residents avail applicable welfare schemes, apply for government cards, provide timely updates on the municipality, or connect residents with their MLAs. In the midst of this, every now and then, they will share a few coloured posts that identify and push a narrative. 

Social media posts therefore reach booth-level WhatsApp groups through a waterfall—originating from posts of top influencers or organisational leaders that are spread by surrogates. These surrogates have become the most popular channel of news consumption– and form the bedrock of political messaging, especially for people below 60 years. 

But sometimes booth whisper campaigns and WhatsApp waterfalls do not work. This is especially so in states with a strong regional sentiment, wherein state identity trumps caste identities (as in the case of Bengal or Odisha). Here, parties literally engineer sub-identities that may have never existed before. These micro-narratives are floated to mobilize groups, like sub-castes, that align with the party to form a local vote bank. 

For example, in Bengal, the BJP initially attempted to woo the people of Jalpaiguri by encouraging them to embrace their historical religious identities—and weaken their broader Bengali affiliation. It didn't work. Then it attempted to fuel sub-caste sentiments using the Citizenship Amendment Act to mobilise the Rajbanshi (Hindu refugees from Bangladesh) and Matua (a Dalit Hindu group with roots in Bangladesh). In this way, sub-caste identities were made to seem more significant than they ever were before. The BJP has used prominent leaders from these Rajbanshi and Matua communities to promote a micro-narrative of Bangladeshi infiltration into Bengal.

At this point I must clarify that not all narratives are negative—or based on fear-mongering per se. In the 2019 Assembly elections in Haryana, rumours in Punjabi-dominated booths claimed that the BJP was set to appoint a Punjabi Chief Minister. In Brahmin-dominated booths, the rumours claimed there would be a Brahmin CM. The Congress replicated this strategy in Himachal Pradesh—where it seemed to put forward three Chief Ministerial candidates at the same time.

Successful national parties—like the Modi-Shah BJP juggernaut—build extremely robust and accountable booth-level organisations. The booth is where sentiments are identified, emotions swayed, and communities captured—using carefully crafted micro-narratives. The big-picture national debates and campaigns around Ram Mandir or CAA are just the tip of a very large iceberg.