Political communication and the electoral campaign: A case study of the 2014 national election

Elections in India can be characterised as a near copy book case of democratic functioning. Conducted with regularity, characterised by national and sub-national multi-party competition, citizens’ right to vote or express their rejection of candidate/party option through the recently introduced ‘none of the above option’, the entire electoral process claims to reflect the voter choices and preferences as accurately as possible. While the process of conducting elections in India has gained maturity since independence, the nature of electoral outcomes has also become predictable. The rise of regional parties and burgeoning coalition governments at the national level, declining currency of identity politics whether based on caste, ethnicity or religion and the rise of the politics of development often cited to explain bucking of the anti-incumbency trend may all seen as signposts of a ‘modernising’ democratic system. However the verdict of the 2014 Lok Sabha election which returned a national party to power with an absolute majority of its own, historically associated with a right wing majoritarian religious sensibility challenges all available understanding of the Indian electoral process. The question that one is exploring in this paper is why has a national party returned to power after two decades of coalition governments. The hypothesis is that the nature of political communication and the electoral campaign conducted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was a deterministic variable responsible for the 2014 Lok Sabha verdict.