MUMBAI: Do voters in India choose their MPs and MLAs based on the colour of their skin? Our politicians will have us believe that they do. Hoardings and posters being put up across cities and towns show politicians, who otherwise have a healthy dark skin, in an almost unrecognisable sickly white colour.Advertising professionals handling election campaigns say one brief that most politicians give is to make their skin colour several shades lighter than what it is.“Bas chamka do’ (just brighten it up) is the brief given to us,” said a top executive in a firm that has been making hoardings and posters for politicians. Besides looking fairer, many politicians also want their wrinkles removed and potbellies cut down to look younger and fitter. And if they are balding, many simply hand over a decade-old photograph to the ad agency for the campaign.Azhar Khan of Z Creative, who is creating publicity materials for some 50 candidates in Maharashtra, said that the requests they get from politicians range from making them fair to giving them proper shape. “Once a politician who was a bit squint-eyed didn’t want the photo to reflect that, so we corrected it,” he said.“However most of the demand pertains to changing the person’s skin colour,” Khan added. Raju Kakade of Smile India, who has bagged a contract to make publicity material for a political party in Maharashtra, however, finds nothing wrong in making politicians fairer. “They don’t ask us (to make them fairer), but we do it for them. After all don’t you want to look presentable? People are inclined towards it. It has its advantages,” he said.Kakade added that politicians pay a huge attention to what kind of photos are being used in their campaign material and undergo numerous shoots to achieve the right look. According to him, BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi could have clicked some 5,000 different photographs. “I had recently been to Gujarat and I saw that in every road and every street there was a different picture of Modi,” Kakade said.Not everyone is impressed by politicians paying utmost attention to their looks on posters. Anil Galgali, a social activist, said, “These guys should know that it’s not your skin colour but work that counts."