Defeat seemed imminent: surveys had writ, and having writ, had moved on. However, in India’s dynamic political landscape, where with the right narrative spin, political fortunes can reverse in the blink of an eye, giving up is not an option. And, so, Suhel Pratap Singh, a political consultant — who, over the last decade has worked with several political parties, including the Indian National Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) — was charged with coming up with a winning strategy and leading a “war room” in a “backward” constituency in Rajasthan.
The constituency assigned to him might have been “backward” by all accounts and indices, but the electioneering process was as avant-garde as could be. “When I reached the location, I was flabbergasted. There was no hotel or building anywhere in sight, just a tabela (cow shed). I called the liaisons, sure I had been given the wrong address, but, to my surprise, a couple of minutes later, the client (candidate) showed up on the spot. We had a brief chat about the constituency and bafflingly started walking in the direction of the tabela. But, as soon as we stepped inside the cow shelter, I realised, it indeed was the war room, with a big hall with a sitting capacity of 70 people, equipped with laptops and PCs, and two dedicated conference rooms for internal meetings,” recalls Suhel.
Suhel, who works for Ground Zero, a political consultancy firm currently representing the Congress party in Maharashtra and Odisha, is among the thousands of savvy professionals — engineers, MBAs, lawyers, journalists and psephologists among others — who have proliferated the burgeoning, lucrative, and “recession-proof” political consultancy business over the last decade.
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A multi-million dollar industry
The political consultancy industry has certainly come a long way since the last decade, when hundreds of Indian professionals from top schools and companies came together to form Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG), which ran Narendra Modi’s 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign, MBA-style, paving way for more players to enter the field. In fact, the original CAG team had first-mover advantage, with many members building their own teams — Prashant Kishore formed I-PAC, Sunil Kanugolu started Mindshare Analytics and Inclusive Minds, Himanshu Singh set up the Association of Billion Minds, and Robbin Sharrma started Showtime Consulting. Now, many of their associates too have started their own political consulting ventures.