The attempt to identify the first consulting firm in India is a challenging task given the clandestine manner in which such firms often function. Nonetheless, one of the first political consulting firms that came to public prominence was Viplav Communications. Founded in 2003 by Pallav Pandey, an engineering graduate from IIT Kanpur, who had worked in the US for many years before his return to India, Viplav Communications started out as a firm that developed digital communication tools and services designed for politicians and political parties.
It began operating in the lead-up to the 2004 general election and offered politicians data-driven inputs to help them strategise and take decisions on electoral matters. Among many of Viplav’s novel innovations was a service called SuperCaller, which allowed a politician to make 500,000 telephone calls to voters daily with a pre-recorded message, and a ‘Constituency Management Software’ which stored detailed records of the socio-economic profile of voters and voting trends in every electoral constituency in the country.
Initially, Pandey’s business model was met with considerable scepticism by political parties which found it difficult to trust his advice on matters related to elections and campaigning — a domain over which political parties have historically claimed epistemic superiority. Pandey was able to overcome this inertia by managing to convince a new generation of MPs who were contesting the Lok Sabha election for the first time in 2004 (A. Gupta, 2005). This included prominent names such as Jyotiraditya Scindia (then INC MP from Guna, Madhya Pradesh) and Navjot Singh Sidhu (then BJP MP from Amritsar, Punjab). Being identified with the success of such high-profile candidates provided Viplav a much-needed shot in the arm when approaching subsequent clients.
The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, Amogh Dhar Sharma, Cambridge University Press, 2024.
In the 2009 general election, candidates from a range of different political parties employed the services of Viplav. The most extensive use was witnessed in Orissa, where the state assembly election was being held in conjunction with the general election. Between 2000 and 2009, the BJD and the BJP had formed a coalition government in Orissa, and the BJD’s Naveen Patnaik had served as the CM. However, in 2009, the BJD broke off its electoral alliance with the BJP and decided to fight the state assembly election on its own.
When the results were declared, it was a landslide victory for the BJD. Pandey and Viplav claimed full credit for being the brains behind this political stratagem. Before the election, Patnaik had hired Viplav to conduct a large-scale survey in Orissa to gauge the mood of the voters. The findings of this survey suggested that the BJD was the stronger party in the BJD-BJP alliance and that BJD could substantially improve its seat tally by choosing to contest the election independently.
In addition, Viplav also provided the BJD guidance during the ticket distribution process and recommended making Patnaik the centre point of the entire campaign. During the election campaign, Patnaik and other BJD candidates also made extensive use of the SuperCaller service offered by Viplav. Patnaik’s pre-recorded telephone message supposedly reached nearly 6 million mobile and landline phone users in Orissa at the cost of over Rs 10 million to the party coffers. In 2010, Viplav was hired by the then Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, to conduct a pre-poll survey to gauge the mood of the electorate. Such transnational linkages attest to the global remit of political consulting firms.
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Reflecting on his motivation to launch Viplav, Pandey claims that he is a ‘socially motivated’ person who ‘wanted to contribute to a change in the system’ (Rai 2009). He claims that Viplav was more than just an entrepreneurial venture for him; it was his attempt, however modest, to change the broader political system. Through the services offered by Viplav, Pandey believed that a politician could manage his constituency better and establish a closer connection with the voters. Such a claim can also be seen on Viplav’s website and Facebook page which proudly proclaim that it ‘[works] with the mission of creating a better People-Politician Interface’ (Viplav Communications 2009).
This self-confessed social- and public spiritedness can be seen in a range of other initiatives undertaken by Pandey. For instance, Viplav also devised software that could detect duplicate names present in the electoral voters’ list, which could help curtail the electoral malpractice of double voting (Rai 2009). In 2009, Pandey, along with Ambarish Gupta (his friend and colleague from IIT Kanpur), launched Knowlarity Communications—a firm that specialises in the field of cloud-based communication services.
While Knowlarity built upon the range of services that had been offered by Viplav, the firm shifted its area of operations from helping political parties and politicians during elections to serving the needs of small and medium enterprises. Yet the ‘socially motivated’ Pandey found new mechanisms through which he could use his technological solutions to effect a ‘change in the system’.
In 2010, Pandey and Gupta partnered with the Uttar Pradesh government to develop a digital monitoring system that could help keep track of the performance of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme in the province. In this monitoring system, every day a teacher in each government school in Uttar Pradesh would receive an automated phone call enquiring about how many mid-day meals the school had prepared. The teacher would enter the number of meals prepared on the keypad, and from there this information would be relayed to a centralised database maintained by the Mid-Day Meal Directorate of Uttar Pradesh. This monitoring mechanism was acclaimed for having helped identify instances of non-compliance and plug in the leakages found in the Mid-Day Meal Scheme.
After the initial pilot project, Knowlarity obtained a three-and-half-year contract worth Rs 25 million per annum to roll out this technology throughout Uttar Pradesh. Knowlarity also developed a technology called Emergency Coordination and Control System that allowed an individual to make simultaneous phone calls to as many as 3,000 people in the event of an emergency to relay a message of warning or make a request for help. In all these instances, we see that Pandey and his colleagues were applying the same technological infrastructure (SuperCaller, Interactive Voice Response [IVR], and so on) in different areas — from helping politicians canvass for votes in their constituencies to monitoring and evaluating public-sector social welfare schemes. As per publicly available information, Knowlarity is no longer engaged in political consultancy projects.
Amogh Dhar Sharma is a Departmental Lecturer in Development Studies at the Oxford University.
The above is an excerpt from The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, published by the Cambridge University Press this year.
