After a month-long broadcast and publicity campaign exercise of the Congress, with Rahul Gandhi as its poster boy, an internal survey conducted by the party feels it is not as effective as the Bharat Nirman campaign of the UPA Government. The Publicity and Campaign Committee feels the Congress campaign needed to be reformatted.
The AICC sources said the feedback by the committee of the party has found that at the ground level, the Government’s Bharat Nirman campaign was able to communicate more than the party’s own election publicity campaign. The party’s ‘war room’, which monitors Rahul campaign, did an internal survey over for three weeks and expressed concern that the media blitzkrieg has not yielded the desired results. The Communication and Campaign Team of Congress has now convened an urgent meeting this week to strategise the branding in a new format. The feedback points out to the controversy surrounding the lead ‘faces’ in these campaigns and the lack of originality.
“The internal survey has given more numbers to the UPA’s advertisement campaign as it espouses more elements against the party’s own. Even the social media and internet surfing have recorded more hits for Bharat Nirman. We will look into the nitty-gritty’s of it and work for more aggressive publicity,” the internal feedback report says according to a source in the party’s communication and publicity committee.
While the Bharat Nirman advertisement campaign is handled by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the branding of Rahul and party is in the hands of a media publicity and advertisement company. After the AICC session, which decided not to anoint Rahul as PM candidate, the party launched an aggressive publicity campaign, projecting Rahul as its poster boy to counter BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s image.
While Union Minister Jairam Ramesh is working out the logistics, AICC General Secretary Digvijay Singh heads a seven-member communication and publicity team of the sub-group of election strategy committee for the 2014 elections, which is headed by Rahul himself. The reports of internal survey reportedly prompted the Congress to handover the baton of campaign committee to party president Sonia Gandhi from Rahul. Besides Sonia as chairman and Rahul to co-chair, the lok Sabha Campaign Committee, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, senior members Ahmad Patel, Janardan Dwivedi, P Chidambaram, AK Antony, former Chief Ministers Sheila Dikshit and Ashok Gehlot are among the 50 members announced by party last week.
Sources said that Priyanka Gandhi may now be given the larger responsibility to monitor the publicity campaign at the ‘war room’. She will also look after Amethi and Rae Bareilly Parliamentary constituency represented by brother and mother, respectively. Union Ministers P Chidambaram, Sushilkumar Shinde, Anand Sharma, Salman Khurshid, party MPs Renuka Chowdhary, Sandeep Dikshit, Ahmed Patel, Janaradan Dwivedi, Madhusudan Mistry, Ambika Soni, Manish Tewari, Deepender Hooda, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Rajeev Shukla and Bhakta Charan Das are members of the ‘war room’.