Is the 2021 Bengal Assembly election the biggest professional job generator in a COVID-19-hit – and cash strapped – State’s job market?

I-PAC and Nation With Namo (NWN), two strategic groups, are recruiting for the TMC and the BJP respectively, besides strategising the elections. While I-PAC is mainly recruiting for the Bengal and Tamil Nadu polls, NWN is recruiting for West Bengal and Bihar. The job postings are placed in the respective groups’ portal as well as the networking sites. Politicians and experts expect a surge in urban middle class jobs for the first time in next year’s Bengal election.

Digital ecosystem

India has witnessed a surge in various jobs connected to strategy making, publicity and feedback in the national election, but not in the State election. West Bengal’s previous election in 2016, with over 6.5 crore voters, was largely fought on traditional model of past performance, campaigns and candidate profile. While such factors exist, a new factor has evolved. It is to influence voters’ behaviour using digital ecosystem and combining it with party’s on-ground mobilisation. It helps, said Chandra Kumar Bose, BJP’s candidate in the 2019 Lok Sabha election for the south Kolkata seat and a former TATA group management professional.

“These strategic suggestions have a basis. I was told to try and polarise in certain areas, organise Ram Navami rallies etc. I admire Narendra Modi but I do not believe in all these Hindutva ideology. But I realised that they advised me correctly,” said Mr. Bose, the grand nephew of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.

Psychographics

Now where and how to polarise is the key to win an election globally. It is based on a model — psychographics — designed by now defunct political campaign consulting British firm Cambridge Analytica (CA).

“Psychographics is an understanding of personality. Personality drives behaviour and behaviour influences how you vote,” said CA founder Alexander Nix earlier.

The CA was accused of extracting millions of private data from Facebook to study behaviour to influence voters in the U.S. election in 2016 and the Brexit campaign also the same year. British Broadcaster Channel 4 claimed in its 2018 film on the CA that the organisation was hired in the 2014 Indian national election.

“When Indian firms are recruiting data analysts and professionals from IITs and IIMs to analyse social media users behaviours in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu, it is evident that they are imitating a model set in motion by the CA in 2016 and Data Propris, which is floated by the CA’s employees to steer Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign,” said the owner of a technical job consulting firm on condition of anonymity.

In 2020, I-PAC has a plethora of jobs. Advertised on its website and networking sites it is recruiting under six heads — analytics and technology, digital, design and video campaign, media, field operation and strategic insights, besides finance, legal and human resources. Mainly, the political consulting firm is recruiting for the coming elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

900 professionals hired

I-PAC chief Prashant Kisor said earlier that the organisation had hired about 900 professionals in Bengal.

For the NWN, many of the advertisements are for Bengali content creators for its social media verticals, like Facebook where the group is very active. Besides, there are jobs for political consultants in both Bihar and West Bengal. A BJP insider said that there were other wings looking after “planning, extraction of information from data points, artificial intelligence and data analytics.” “They are expected to recruit separately,” he said.

Unlike I-PAC, the BJP is more keen to recruit “dedicated activists, while I-PAC tends to get more professionals,” a job market researcher said.

‘Internship programme’

The NWN works actively in colleges and universities and recruits interns directly. The placement cell of the St. Xaviers College, Kolkata, recently announced an ‘internship programme’ with the NWN on its Facebook page. Participants were told that they “will be given jobs based on their performance as interns.”

But despite such elaborate engagement of professionals, winning in Indian elections depended on “field level performance,” Mr. Bose said.

“Why I lost to the TMC? Because I could not or party could not put up agents in more than 670 of 2,033 booths in south Kolkata constituency. That is one of the factors,” he said.

Thus, these management strategies and policy making could only work in Indian elections if they complemented the activity and performance of the grassroot levels workers. “If a party cannot put boots on ground, nothing will work and I am a case in point,” Mr. Bose concluded.