Show Time Consulting’s war room with over 200 professionals and party officials engineering landslide victory for Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in the just-concluded Assembly and Lok Sabha polls in Andhra Pradesh.
Robbin Sharrma’s meticulously curated, two-tier war room, which was headed by Shantanu Singh, not only achieved an electoral breakthrough for the TDP but also marked the dawn of a new era in political consulting, claimed Show Time Consulting (STC) on Friday.
Political consulting has played a prominent role in reshaping the Indian political landscape over the last two decades. While political consultancies are hired to deliver unique campaigns, the skeletal structure of operations behind the scenes has remained more or less the same, the political consultancy said.
STC went a step further in Andhra Pradesh to optimise war-room operations like never before. Its Central Command Centre (CCC) was a departure from the traditional top-down approach to war rooms. The CCC consisted of a meticulously curated, two-tiered team of over 200 STC professionals and party officials.
Split into two teams, each with a clear objective, the CCC brought office-bearers across 175 Assembly constituencies on a common platform, creating an extensively interconnected network. This network helped real-time issue identification and monitoring across the state, whilst also shaping customised microstrategies for every assembly segment.
Further coordinating with a cadre of almost 1,400 individuals on the ground, the CCC was able to achieve real-time monitoring of customised outreach initiatives for specific target groups, including youth, women, SC/ST communities, and BCs.
The CCC also identified and focused on 1,461,200 fence-sitting voters. To ensure effective operations, STC had picked a combination of state leads, zonal managers, data analysts, researchers and PR professionals from its team.
This curation armed STC with the ability to craft research and data-backed strategies tailored to fit every assembly segment. As a result of this deeply percolated and active network, the CCC was able to identify and latch on to discontent brewing against the Land Titling Act and turn it into a major narrative for the TDP closer to the elections, the political consultancy said.
TDP Chief Chandrababu Naidu tore a copy of the Act during his “Praja Galam” meeting in the Darsi and asked people to speak up against its draconian provisions. Soon after, people responded to his call, and copies of the land record passbooks were burned across the state.
The Assembly war room, one of the tiers of the CCC, was instrumental in driving communications and percolating the narrative down to the booth level, triggering protests, creating headlines and a high social media impact. The CCC not only allowed TDP to run multiple campaigns simultaneously but also ensured a seamless uniformity of narrative across each one of them.
It cited the example of Nara Bhuvaneswari’s Nijam Gelavali Yatra, which started off as a meeting to thank people for their support after Chandrababu Naidu’s arrest. However, the campaign soon evolved into a state-wide condolence yatra after the CCC learnt that close to 200 people had succumbed to the shock of Naidu’s arrest. The gears were changed, and Bhuvaneswari set off on a tour across the state, condoling the grieving families and also addressing women-only gatherings. It was in these gatherings that she raised local and state-level issues, apart from speaking emotionally about the injustice done to Naidu.
TDP-Jana Sena-BJP alliance swept the polls, winning 164 Assembly seats in the 175-member House. It also bagged 21 out of 25 Lok Sabha seats.
TDP alone won 135 Assembly and 16 Lok Sabha seats.
