The Modi-centric BJP 2014 election campaign: new techniques and old tactics
Résumé
The 2014 election campaign of the BJP was unprecedented not only because, for the first time, a Chief Minister was the prime ministerial candidate of one of the national parties in the fray and tried to promote his state achievements in terms of development across the nation, but also because the party relied on the personality of its leader more than any other party since the Congress under Indira Gandhi. Narendra Modi broke with the BJP's collegial tradition in several ways. He marginalised party veterans, short circuited the BJP apparatus to use a parallel support structure, and resorted to new techniques of communication that saturated the public space. However, these innovations were superimposed on older themes which had sometimes not been used by the BJP itself before, but by others – like caste politics or corruption. Modi's BJP also fell back on some alliances with other parties, the old RSS network, and revisited Hindutva politics to such an extent that ‘development' was definitely not the only theme of the Modi campaign.