Narendra Modi arrives for a rally in Allahabad Narendra Modi arrives for a rally in Allahabad

It's May 2. In the BJP war room in Varanasi's Surya Hotel, Amit Shah is huddled over an India map like a general plotting his next move. The phone rings. It's his boss, Narendra Modi. After a public rally in Balrampur, Uttar Pradesh, the BJP prime ministerial candidate is rushing back to Gandhinagar for a 3D holographic speech that will be relayed to 100 locations, mostly in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. BJP pollsters have alerted party strategists that Lalu Prasad Yadav has been gaining ground in Bihar while in eastern Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party and Congress may be shoring up their respective vote banks. The outcome of the brief conversation, conducted in chaste Gujarati, is that Modi will go to Rahul Gandhi's constituency, Amethi, on May 5 to quell Priyanka Gandhi's surging media momentum.

As the BJP campaign, encompassing all forms of media across every platform, swings into action to prepare its Amethi assault, what makes the Modi machine so formidable becomes apparent immediately. Calls are made to the party's Media Cell in New Delhi to get the message out. The National Digital Operations Centre in the party's Delhi headquarters is directed to update Modi's schedule on Facebook and create a Twitter buzz. The India272+ mobile app is updated, and instructions are sent to 2.5 million active volunteers across the country. Within minutes, the entire edifice comes up to speed with an Amethi strategy as if it was always meant to be in Modi's flight plan.

By the time the Gujarat Chief Minister goes into the daily 7.30 a.m. meeting with his campaign managers in his Gandhinagar home on May 5, having addressed eight other rallies over the past two days in Uttarakhand, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, a detailed Amethi dossier is on his in-flight reading list. The rest is left to Modi's powerful oratory and his ability to connect with audiences no matter which language they speak or which state they live in. "This is my younger sister Smriti Irani. I chose her for Amethi, but not to create fresh problems for the mother and son (Sonia Gandhi and Rahul). I sent her to solve Amethi's problems," he tells the Amethi crowd later in the day, before training his guns at Candidate Rahul and Campaigner Priyanka: "My little sister will take care of Amethi much more than your own sister takes care of you." Modi goes on to describe Amethi as one of India's most backward districts because of "40 wasted years" and "three wasted generations".

On the morning of the rally, BJP leader Yashwant Sinha released a slick eight-minute video about the neglect of Amethi. By afternoon, #NaMoINAmethi was trending on Twitter and the 'documentary' was on YouTube to complete the 360 experience.

Wherever you are in India, whatever your politics, and whomever you did or didn't vote for, the spectre of Modi hangs over the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. So relentless has been his campaign, so dramatic his delivery, and so ubiquitous his development message, that he has converted a complex parliamentary system into a presidential-style referendum on himself. Over the last nine months, Modi has travelled 300,000 km, or seven times the Earth's equatorial circumference. He has attended 5,187 events, addressed 477 rallies in 25 states while sleeping barely five hours a night, and harnessed the Internet and mobile telephony to connect with an estimated 230 million people, or one in every four voters. That's more people than the population of Brazil and three times the combined annual traffic of the Delhi and Mumbai airports. These are figures Barack Obama's 2012 US presidential campaign, from which the Modi machine learnt how to create an all-round 24x7 experience, would be proud of. Root for Modi or reject him, the way India's most controversial mass leader managed to create a personality cult in one short year will forever change how elections are fought in this country.

Giving development a dialect

What has worked for the Modi campaign is how he has steadfastly spoken about development, and development alone. He's contrasted his free-market economics with the Congress policy of expensive welfare schemes that have failed to make an impact on the ground due to poor implementation. Narrating his own life story as a tea-seller who is fighting to be prime minister, and a chief minister who kept Gujarat's golden wheels turning, Modi projects himself as the strong leader India has been clamouring for. "When the economic downturn began in 2009, Modi's development story started to gain credibility. For the last nine years, the Congress spoke of communalism versus secularism but Modi had already moved on from there. If Modi is where he is today, he has to thank Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan Singh for not adapting to a changing script," says Dipankar Gupta, Director of the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory at Shiv Nadar University.

Campaign blitz Click here to Enlarge Campaign blitz

Despite his strong Hindutva credentials stemming from his early days in RSS, which openly backs him and campaigns for him, Modi has managed to distance himself from a right-wing agenda in a way that L.K. Advani had been unable to in 2004 and 2009. If you believe the message, Modi's campaign is a redefinition of Indian electoral politics, a paradigm shift where the promise is of fulfilling the aspirations of everybody, rather than reaching out to certain vote banks. "The Modi campaign has been imagined by looking at constituencies and segments as opposed to the traditional focus of almost exclusively appealing to caste," says social commentator and author Santosh Desai. "While caste continues to be a factor, the understanding is that the rural and urban are focused on the future and united in their desire for a better life." A seller of dreams, Modi has tapped directly into this sentiment, creating a new constituency among the middle-class by simultaneously playing to their anxieties and the confidences.

"Modi showed us that development has a dialect. Just like the Gujarat model, there is a Bihar model, a Rajasthan model, says Shiv Visvanathan, Professor at O P Jindal Global University in Sonepat. "In the end, he just sounded more efficient than the Congress. Through a well-orchestrated, brilliantly organised campaign, he managed to appropriate not just secularism but also nationalism."

The many phases of Modi

The Modi campaign was designed in phases more than a year ago, and he has tirelessly managed to follow the grand plan with almost no deviations. In the first phase, from March to September last year, Modi set out to convince the nation, and more importantly senior leaders within his own party, that he could be the face of change India so desperately seeks. His mission was to showcase his popularity, one speech at a time. Modi accepted invitations to events that catered to key demographics across the country-be it Sri Ram College of Commerce in New Delhi, FICCI Ladies Organisation, Google Big Tent, or the India Today Conclave on March 16, 2013, where he first articulated his 'Gujarat model' in detail. "The aim was to create bottom-up pressure on the BJP leadership," says a campaign insider. "Modi made it a US-style primary in which he had no direct opponent."

Everywhere man Everywhere man

The second phase was directed at the Assembly elections in five states, where Modi held a total of 55 rallies from September to November, enabling BJP to sweep Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, return to power in Chhattisgarh, and emerge as the largest party in Delhi though its sheen was taken away by the emergence of his Varanasi Lok Sabha opponent Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party.

The third phase, from December 9 to March 13, was devoted to shoring up the party's internal mechanics in various states, rolling out new technological innovations, and attracting new allies and breakaway candidates. All of it engineered to facilitate the final push from March to May, with the launch of the 'Abki Baar Modi Sarkar' campaign slogan, created by the advertising agency Soho Square. In this phase, Modi started taking on regional leaders on their home turfs in 196 Bharat Vijay rallies across India-from Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal to J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, and from Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh to Lalu Yadav in Bihar.

Over the course of the campaign, Modi has developed a pattern in his speeches to tap into the deepest sentiments of his audiences. He begins by reminding them that they are a glorious people, and then goes into the local problems they are dealing with, contrasting their condition with the purported comfort of Gujarat. Modi then highlights the ineffectiveness of Congress governments over 60 years, setting the tone for jibes at his opponents and the promise of a grand future if he is given just one opportunity. The range of his local connect is apparent in how he spoke about the plight of banana farmers in Hajipur, Bihar, illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in Kolkata, and rampant economic backwardness in Bhubaneswar. In Jharkhand, he reminded his listeners how Jhumri Tilaiya was once famous for sending the highest number of song requests to All India Radio. And in Imphal, Manipur, he told the crowd that repairing the Jiribam highway can lessen the state's burden if there's an economic blockade in Nagaland.

The frenzy Modi generates is a natural extension of how he effectively touches a nerve, speaking only of development, economic progress and the 'Gujarat model'. Brand Modi, which once stood for division and majoritarianism, now signifies good governance. The Hindutva theme, though delivered subliminally through backdrops or references to local temples and deities, is never part of the main plot. One example of the reaction he invokes was how, during his serpentine roadshow in Varanasi on April 24, passengers rolling into the city by train repeatedly pulled the chain at a railway over-bridge to cheer Modi as his rally was passing below them.



High on technology

A key element of Modi's morning meetings in Gandhinagar is deciding how the speeches of Rahul Gandhi and Modi's other political rivals will be monitored, and how their salient points will be delivered to Modi, who is airborne for a large part of the day as he shuttles from venue to venue. Key quotes are collected by his personal assistant Om Prakash Chandel, who travels with him, and passed on to Modi so that he can respond in his next speech. Another critical feature of life on the campaign trail is fastidiously sticking to schedule because even the slightest delay can throw the rest of the day into a tailspin. It is precise planning and constant monitoring of resources by Modi's staff that allows him to return home every night to prepare afresh for the next day. "Modiji owed at least 20 per cent of his public meetings to precise scheduling which enabled him to address more rallies," says Akhil Handa, former banker who now works with the Modi-backed NGO Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG).

A Modi 3D speech being beamed in Ahmedabad A Modi 3D speech being beamed in Ahmedabad

A cornerstone of the Modi campaign is the technical innovations that his team has been able to roll out to multiply his outreach. Quick to recognise the power of the internet and mobile phones in electioneering, Modi surrounded himself with tech-savvy supporters early to develop a comprehensive information dissemination system. His first order of business was ensuring that his maha rally in Rewari on September 15 was available on mobile phone. Users could dial in for a live broadcast of his speech to ex-servicemen in the Haryana hinterland. The range of this service has expanded over the last nine months. Subscribers can now listen to pre-recorded clips of Modi talking about issues such as inflation, development, corruption. Campaign insiders say more than three million people have heard Modi's speeches by dialling 4501-4501 in April alone.

The campaign's next offerings came in January: The India272+ mobile app for Android devices and the Modi4PM donation drive. Volunteers set up canopies to collect money and promote Modi. Sources in the IT Cell say the drive has already raked in more than Rs 5 crore. The publicity cost, not including TV, radio and print, is estimated to be Rs 150 crore.

On February 19, a week after Modi's Facebook likes hit the 10-million mark, the campaign launched a special NaMo Number. An SMS, missed call, or WhatsApp message to 78200-78200 added the user to BJP's database as a potential volunteer. Campaign sources say they receive an average of 100,000 missed calls on a daily basis, and that the total interactions with people through this service has now hit 130 million-more than half of the campaign's total outreach.

"Everyone talks only about the Internet, but it's mobile phones that have been the game-changer in the Modi campaign," says Arvind Gupta, IT Cell head. India has 205 million web users, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. In comparison, India's mobile subscriber base was 915.9 million in the end of 2013.

The branding for the next initiative, launched on February 20, was an example of how the Modi campaign has often been able to convert adversity into opportunity. During the AICC session in New Delhi on January 17, Mani Shankar Aiyar commented that though Modi can never become India's PM, they could make place for a tea stall for him at the meeting venue. Picking up on this, BJP decided to hold its remote 'nukkad sabhas' at tea shops and call them 'Chai pe Charcha'.

Through March and April, a fleet of GPS-fitted vans, or digital raths, drove to village squares across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and played clips of Modi's speeches on 55-inch LED screens.

The last, and perhaps most effective tool, was the 3D rallies which started on April 10, one month before the last day of campaigning. Modi's experiment with 3D holograms during the 2012 Gujarat Assembly elections had got him a place in the Guinness World Records for delivering a speech to 53 locations simultaneously. These events sparked dramatic reactions. At a rally in Amritsar on April 18, some BJP supporters decided to get closer to Modi. As they surreptitiously started moving towards the dais, the security personnel were more amused than bemused. The supporters hadn't realised that it wasn't Modi in front of them, but only his holographic projection.

Thinking on their feet

In another instance of the campaign's flexibility, the moment Modi heard that Bihar needed his attention, he increased the frequency of his 3D appearances from once in three days to every evening from May 2 onwards. "It's sad that India's one arm comprising western states Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra is prosperous while its eastern arm comprising Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, the North-east and Odisha is not," Modi said from his hi-tech 3D studio managed by CAG, which is run by key campaign manager Prashant Kishor and comprises nearly 1,000 volunteers many of whom are from IITs and IIMs. "The hi-tech campaign has taken the Modi wave many miles further," says Kishor. A virtual Modi has already addressed nearly 14 million people.

Modi with his key campaign manager Prashant Kishor Modi with his key campaign manager Prashant Kishor

Each time, he's spoken about the will to bring about change, not temples, communities or beliefs. The issues raised have been specifically tailored for his audiences, but the message universal.

But as Modi stands on the shores of the Ganga at the end of his revolutionary campaign, questions still remain. Has he been able to convince India that he stands for development and not Hindutva? Is the 'Gujarat model' alluring enough to overcome deeply entrenched caste equations? Can he actually deliver on his promises? Having clocked more than 300,000 km, Modi has literally gone from the Earth to the moon to become prime minister. The campaign was no small step. Can he now make the giant leap?

Follow the writers on Twitter @_kunal_pradhan and @UdayMahurkar

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