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There is a reason why democracies often swing from one extreme to another in a short span of time. From Obama to Trump in just 8 years, the United States looked very liberal and very conservative within a decade. In India, we saw a Manmohan Singh government that was weak on public communication gave way to a Narendra Modi government that is hyper-communicative.
There is a simple reason for this: the public thinks in terms of contrast. Black and white. Dark and light. This or that. Since they usually have two choices, Democrat or Republican, BJP or Congress, an increase in contrast makes voters swing.
After a long dry spell of summer, after you can no longer bear the scorching heat, come the Indian monsoon rains. We love these rains and even have a word for the smell of rain, petrichor.
It is the contrast from the dry heat that makes us love the monsoons. We hate the same rains a few days later when our streets get waterlogged and we forget our umbrellas behind.
The power of contrast in shaping our perceptions and desires often goes unnoticed. We are shaped subconsciously by the power of contrast. We see too many action movies and then want to see a romcom. “Needed a change,” we say.
We changed it
In the narratives the Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi offer to the Indian voter, they have maximised the power of contrast.
In balmy Goa, which I recently visited to experience the contrasting weather from chilly Delhi, the BJP’s campaign is called “Badal Dista” — meaning ‘we changed it’. On the left there’s a photo of a barren patch of land, on the right a photo of a newly built flyover.
There are many such “creatives” highlighting not just the achievements of the BJP government in Goa but placing them in context of how things used to be. This produces a contrast. The colour scheme used in these posters also serves to highlight the contrast between “Then” and “Now”. The “now” is highlighted in bright pictures.
The BJP has been in power for 8 years now, and should ideally be facing a considerable amount of that curious Indian way of describing unpopularity: “anti-incumbency”. In Goa as across India, a key way the Modi-era BJP retains voters is by using the power of contrast.
We are better than the other guy
The idea of contrast is used in many ways. One is to create a sense of ‘pro-incumbency’ to persuade voters the BJP opted for development or welfare that was absent before. Another way the power of contrast is used is to say that for all its faults and failures critics may point out, the BJP is still a better option than its opponents.
We see this second kind of contrast in full swing in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP has been in power since 2017. The BJP pitch for re-election seems to be entirely about being better than the Samajwadi Party. This contrast the BJP wants to create seeks to negate any sense of anti-incumbency. The Samajwadi Party can talk as much as it wants about inflation and unemployment but the BJP has explained its 5 years as a contrast to the 5 years before.
This is not tough to beat. All that the Samajwadi Party or any other opposition party needs is to use the power of contrast to their own advantage. The Samajwadi Party could offer its own contrasting creatives to claim that the state of affairs has gone downhill since 2017.
Managing expectations through contrast
The reason why this strategy works so well is that it manages voters’ expectations rather well. It avoids the pitfalls of the BJP’s “India Shining” campaign of 2004, which led it to defeat. Many unhappy rural voters didn’t agree.
If you just say you built this highway, a voter might say, ‘So what? All governments build highways’. Instead, if you say, “My opponent was not building this highway! He didn’t want development in this area! I had this highway built at last!” then your pitch becomes persuasive. You now become reluctant to bring the previous guy back in power.
Obsessed with Rahul Gandhi
Many supporters of the Congress party often wonder: Why does the BJP attack Rahul Gandhi so assiduously when they also claim he’s irrelevant? How can both things be true? It does seem a little odd for the BJP to be so obsessed with an opponent doing so badly that he couldn’t even retain his family pocket borough in Amethi.
The BJP wants to make sure the distance between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi so huge that even in a worst-case scenario, Modi wins over Rahul. This distance is created through contrast and this contrast is created not just by making Rahul Gandhi look bad.
After the failure of demonetisation in 2016, BJP went on an excessive attack drive against the Congress, attacking everyone from Jawaharlal Nehru to Manmohan Singh. The idea again was to keep focusing on the Congress party’s faults and failures, misses and mistakes, to make the BJP’s own failures look less bad. Contrast, contrast, contrast.
Once again, all that the Congress has to do is to play the contrast game on its own terms. Rahul Gandhi did some of that in his speech in Parliament earlier this week, where he said that the Congress had pulled millions out of poverty and the BJP has only increased inequality.
Similarly, the BJP’s attack line that the Congress did nothing in 60-70 years can also be answered in contextual contrast. To appreciate what India has achieved since 1947, we will have to see things in contrast to where 300 years of ravaging colonial rule had left us.
