Amogh Dhar Sharma’s The Backstage of Democracy is not a casual academic book. It is a serious, urgent and deeply revealing account of how Indian elections have been fundamentally transformed, not by voters or politicians alone, but by a new class of political professionals who have quietly redrawn the map of democratic politics in India.

Over a decade of fieldwork, Sharma pulls back the curtain on India’s electoral theatre to show us the “backstage” – the consultants, data engineers, digital war-room operatives, pollsters, media specialists and technocratic elites who now shape political campaigns in granular, calculated and often ethically murky ways. His argument is sharp: India’s democracy has not simply been digitised; it has been professionalised. That shift is political, cultural and deeply sociological.

From mass movements to managed campaigns

Through two conceptual lenses, internal and external professionalisation, Sharma traces how parties like the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began relying less on old-school cadre-based mobilisation and more on salaried employees, in-house policy researchers, social media handlers and corporate-trained professionals. He calls these people "party employees".

Parallelly, political campaigns now also outsource major work like voter segmentation, message design, even booth strategy, to external consultants, like the now-famous Prashant Kishor and his firm I-PAC. These consultants operate outside party ideology. They are loyal not to ideas, but to efficiency. That is Sharma’s deeper concern.

When electoral politics becomes the domain of professionals trained in marketing, data science and public relations, what happens to the messy, participatory, ideological roots of Indian democracy? The answer, Sharma suggests, is sobering: they begin to rot.

One of the most powerful contributions of this book is Sharma’s sociological profiling of the new political professionals. These are largely urban, upper-caste, English-speaking, middle-class men, products of elite institutions like IITs and IIMs, who view politics as a management problem, not a social struggle.

They are not elected, but they often determine who gets tickets. They don’t speak the language of ideology, but they master the language of “sentiment analysis”. They don’t canvas; they create WhatsApp narratives. They don’t believe in grassroots democracy; they believe in “targeted messaging”.

Sharma’s discomfort with this new class is not moral, it’s political. These professionals have turned political participation into a commodity, political insight into analytics and electoral strategy into a service industry. They are the consultants of a hollow democracy, serving whichever party hires them, as long as the money flows.

BJP, Congress and the uneven terrain

While Sharma’s analysis spans multiple parties, the BJP looms large over the book. With its 2014 and 2019 victories, the BJP didn't just win elections, it changed how campaigns are fought. The creation of the BJP's National Digital Operations Centre (its IT Cell), the rise of India272 and its viral propaganda arms, and the strategic use of communal polarisation in digital form all point to a party that fully embraced professionalisation – especially its darker, authoritarian edge.

In contrast, the Congress’s adoption of professionalisation is more hesitant, sometimes self-defeating. Through the case study of the AIPC (All India Professionals’ Congress), Sharma shows how INC attempted to bring technocrats into the party, but often without giving them real power. The party wanted to be seen as modern, but failed to root that modernity in political will.

This uneven adoption across parties creates an electoral field where the BJP’s weaponised data infrastructure outpaces others, not just technically, but discursively. BJP’s political consultants have used technology to amplify Hindu nationalist ideology, creating a terrifying synergy between corporate professionalism and right-wing populism.

Technology and the politics of evidence

Perhaps the most intellectually satisfying part of Sharma’s book is his critique of how technology is imagined in politics – not just as a tool, but as a discourse. He shows that professionalisation is not only about new gadgets or data dashboards. It is also about a new way of speaking about politics: terms like “data-driven”, “scientific”, “neutral” and “objective” become the new mantras.

But who decides what counts as "data"? Who defines what “the public mood” is? Who builds the algorithms and to what end?

Drawing on theorists like Jürgen Habermas and Paolo Mancini, Sharma argues that this is the scientificisation of politics – a shift from ideological debate to technocratic calculation. While this may seem apolitical, it is anything but. It displaces accountability, erases ideology and hands over politics to consultants who are unelected, unaccountable and often invisible.

This is not just a story of changing campaigns. It is a story of changing democracy.

When political parties become clients of private firms, when slogans are tested in focus groups, when booth-level workers are replaced by spreadsheet dashboards, then democracy is no longer a public, participatory event. It becomes a product launch.

And that is the true danger of professionalisation: it doesn’t just change how elections are fought. It changes why we fight them.

The old dreams of democratic politics – justice, equality, secularism – are slowly being replaced by dreams of market segmentation, brand recall and voter conversion. Politics is no longer about mobilisation; it is about manipulation.

In that sense, Sharma’s book is not merely descriptive. It is a warning.

What makes this book persuasive is not just its argument, but its method. Sharma spent years talking to consultants, party workers, strategists, digital volunteers and campaign architects. This is rare ethnographic work, and it shows. His descriptions of the BJP’s IT Cell, of the behind-the-scenes “Chai Pe Charcha”, of the caste-coded voter surveys, of backroom battles over slogans – these moments bring alive the otherwise invisible labour of electoral politics.

He shows that behind every viral tweet is a war room. Behind every speech is a segmentation matrix. Behind every jingoistic WhatsApp forward is a strategy to consolidate vote banks.

And behind every successful campaign is not just a charismatic leader, but a group of young men with Excel sheets, coding skills and the ideological detachment to work for anyone who pays.

The Backstage of Democracy is not a book that will leave you optimistic, but it will make you wiser. It names a shift that many of us have felt but not understood: the slow, steady transformation of democracy into a consultant-managed simulation of participation.

In this India, elections are not ideological battles; they are branding exercises. Votes are not earned by conviction, but captured by precision-targeted micro-messaging. Citizens are not political agents; they are consumers in a segmented market.

And democracy, in this model, is no longer a collective aspiration; it is a service outsourced to professionals.

Sharma has written a book that is brave, necessary and politically urgent. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand how India votes today and what we are losing in the process.

Ismail Salahuddin is a writer and researcher based in Delhi, focusing on Muslim identity, Communal Politics, Caste, and the politics of knowledge. Social Exclusion & Inclusive Policy at Jamia Millia Islamia, ismail.jnu@gmail.com

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