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With 3 of my batchmates joining the good paymaster "CAG"....I was continuously in search of a proper critique.
Note: It is currently employing Tier 1 B-school graduates only...
Here it is. Thank you Economist
A new style of Indian campaign
Cagey
Feb 10th 2014, 13:23 by A.T. | DELHI
CAG is the name of one of the most respected institutions in Indian public life, beating out even the Supreme Court of late. Its initials stand for Comptroller and Auditor General and its job is to conduct non-partisan audits of the government. Under the leadership of Vinod Rai, who ran it until May 2013, it exposed a series of mammoth scams. When the CAG speaks, the public listens and crooked politicians take fright.
Now there is a new, somewhat sneaky CAG. Citizens for Accountable Governance is the name of an energetic group which first appeared last summer and has been growing much bigger and more voluble since the start of 2014. On the Indian internet, this CAG is an online shape-shifter. As Sankalp it wants to empower India’s women; as Samvaad, to fix the economic crisis in the countryside that has led to farmers committing suicide; Manthan was an initiative to bring young Indians into conversation about national politics; while the Indian Republic (which doesn’t have “CAG” in its URL) bills itself as “India’s largest not-for-profit news portal” and looks like an online newspaper. The sites all share slick graphics and pictures of the attractive young professionals who are getting involved. The only other thing these civic organisations have in common is a vagueness about their ultimate purpose.
But the CAG’s most visible activity over the next few months gives away the game, as do the back pages of its central website. On February 12th the organisers of “Chai pe Charcha”will be bringing Narendra Modi, the prime-ministerial candidate for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), into a video-broadcast “discussion over tea” with voters in 1,000 locations. The CAG, its founders will admit in conversation (though not on any of these websites), is “the campaign support team” for Mr Modi’s campaign. They chose their name in a nod to Mr Rai’s service as the national auditor, which called attention to corruption during a time of Congress party-led government. Now they are a group of 66 employees—compensated volunteers, technically. On third-party websites, they say they are based in Mumbai, which makes them sound pan-Indian and pro-business. In fact their headquarters are in Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat state, where Mr Modi sits as chief minister.
The CAG gives a sideways view into a part of the Modi campaign; what they choose not to say about themselves is at least as interesting as what they do say. At first glance the Indian Republic looks like a neutral arbiter of the day’s news. As well as covering Indian politics, it has sections devoted to the rest of the world, and others for sport, tech and the lives of pop stars. Attractive links to its news articles run on the home-pages of Slate, the Independent,Time and other international clients served by Outbrain, a content-marketing firm. A lot of its articles about, say, the Sochi Olympics, are just cobbled together from the wire agencies (and not attributed). But the Indian Republic’s articles about Mr Modi, the Congress party or the insurgent Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) tend to be written in-house and signed. It might never have run a piece about the other CAG’s finding about corruption in Gujarat’s state-owned enterprises, but what it does run says a great deal about the Modi campaign’s hopes and anxieties. For example, after AAP did very well in the Delhi elections, the Indian Republicbegan highlighting the flaws of its leader, Arvind Kejriwal, with new gusto. When a committee convened by Raghuram Rajan, the new governor of India’s central bank, ranked Gujarat among the country’s less-developed states, the Indian Republic was apoplectic.
This has the effect of making the reader wonder what surreptitious messages might be built into the CAG’s campaign. The last time cadres of the BJP went round the country with donation boxes for a building project was when they were campaigning to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya, on the site of a 16th-century mosque that had been torn down by a Hindu mob in 1992. So it is striking that another CAG offshoot, the Statue of Unitymovement, is going round collecting old iron implements from farms around the country. The idea is to erect a 182-metre statue of Sardar Patel, a Gujarati leader of the independence movement who was known as the Iron Man of India for his stern, no-roadblocks approach to forging a single nation after the partition from Pakistan. His would be the tallest statue in the world, twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, its backers say, built of concrete, clad in recycled iron and facing a gigantic and controversial dam that bears Patel’s name and brings the Narmada river to serve the cities of Gujarat. Mr Modi’s image flashes back and forth with Patel’s in the video.
As it happens Patel hated the Hindu nationalists of his day, but he has since been made a favourite icon of India’s extreme right.
Over tea, Siddharth Mazumdar explains that he and the like-minded group of friends who started CAG have no interest in the divisive tactics of the Hindu hard right. They approached Prashant Kishor, a chief strategist for Mr Modi, early last year, and CAG was born. Mr Mazumdar says he “wanted to see the nerve centre of a political operation” and to help India too. Well-spoken, discursive and idealistic about the mission of the Modi campaign, he does not come off as an ideologue. With a graduate degree from Columbia university in New York, while still in his 20s Mr Mazumdar set aside good job opportunities to hole up in sleepy Gandhinagar.
Mr Mazumdar has a head for wonkish policy debates, and he is inspired by Mr Modi’s ideas about liberalising the national economy, in particular by his Thatcherite slogan, “Government has no business being in business”. He and a colleague, who quit her practice as a lawyer for the duration of the campaign, call themselves “the children of liberalisation”, having grown up in post-1991 India and appreciating its economic dynamism. She thinks that by “removing roadblocks in Gujarat” Mr Modi has shown “how he might unleash potential” for the country as a whole. Both are excited about the sort of activism they have found with CAG, which bypasses the traditional parties’ youth wings. To get into politics as it was, they say, one always needed to have either a pile of cash or family connections. Their group, if they and their friends are any indication, is attracting young professionals who want to see hard work and merit make their mark. Mr Modi wants to empower India by getting it off the dole, they say; and he speaks for all Indians, not just the Hindu majority where he finds his base. Their BJP is a party of the centre-right.
But even here there is a whiff of something that goes unspoken. Mr Mazumdar is at work on a book about the ideas that make Mr Modi his man, ideas which connect the politician to the wisdom of the ancient Vedas, the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, and also famous Indian Muslims like Akbar, not to mention Margaret Thatcher. That sounds broad-minded enough, but then the working title, “Moditva”, carries the strong smell of Hindutva, a doctrine of Hindu supremacy that guides the civic movement that gave birth to the modern BJP. Given Mr Mazumdar’s lack of interest in the pro-Hindu, anti-Muslim politics that characterised the BJP’s approach to campaigns in the 1990s, this seems a curious choice. It is also strange that he regards European movements such as Golden Dawn in Greece and Marine Le Pen’s in France as examples of the good that frustrated young people can do when they organise. Those far-right movements have profited by crisis. And Mr Mazumdar scents opportunity in India’s current financial distress. “In a stressful period,” he says, “you have a good time for an alternative to appear”.
Mr Modi’s campaign wants to appeal to all sorts, as a national campaign must. Along with big business and the urbanising middle classes, that will include the right-wing Hindutva types, as well as the bright young professionals of the cities. The CAG wants mainly to reach the type who want to vote against the incumbent Congress government, which they see as sclerotic and inept, but feel torn between new AAP and Mr Modi’s BJP, which governed Gujarat during a series of massacres in 2002 in which at least a thousand people were killed, most of them Muslim. This must be in part why the CAG tries to avoid looking like anything in particular. Its operatives in Gandhinagar avoid disclosing their address. The group is listed as a Section 25 company, which entitles it to non-profit status, because, as the young lawyer puts it, “there is no traceable link between us and the party”.
A media strategy that makes use of subterfuge—or even the appearance of it—courts suspicion. Borrowing the name “CAG”, until now a trademark for fairness and probity, cannot help. Mr Mazumdar and his colleague seem earnest and forthright in person, and recoil from their association with the groups who want to raise the Ram temple in Ayodhya. They hope their message will reach a great many Indians of their own generation, including many who fear that a vote for Mr Modi would be a vote for an unappealing, covert agenda. Going up against such fears, their group might have an easier time if it were more open about its affiliations.
(Picture credit: Citizens for Accountable Governance)
Note: It is currently employing Tier 1 B-school graduates only...
Here it is. Thank you Economist
A new style of Indian campaign
Cagey
Feb 10th 2014, 13:23 by A.T. | DELHI
CAG is the name of one of the most respected institutions in Indian public life, beating out even the Supreme Court of late. Its initials stand for Comptroller and Auditor General and its job is to conduct non-partisan audits of the government. Under the leadership of Vinod Rai, who ran it until May 2013, it exposed a series of mammoth scams. When the CAG speaks, the public listens and crooked politicians take fright.
Now there is a new, somewhat sneaky CAG. Citizens for Accountable Governance is the name of an energetic group which first appeared last summer and has been growing much bigger and more voluble since the start of 2014. On the Indian internet, this CAG is an online shape-shifter. As Sankalp it wants to empower India’s women; as Samvaad, to fix the economic crisis in the countryside that has led to farmers committing suicide; Manthan was an initiative to bring young Indians into conversation about national politics; while the Indian Republic (which doesn’t have “CAG” in its URL) bills itself as “India’s largest not-for-profit news portal” and looks like an online newspaper. The sites all share slick graphics and pictures of the attractive young professionals who are getting involved. The only other thing these civic organisations have in common is a vagueness about their ultimate purpose.
But the CAG’s most visible activity over the next few months gives away the game, as do the back pages of its central website. On February 12th the organisers of “Chai pe Charcha”will be bringing Narendra Modi, the prime-ministerial candidate for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), into a video-broadcast “discussion over tea” with voters in 1,000 locations. The CAG, its founders will admit in conversation (though not on any of these websites), is “the campaign support team” for Mr Modi’s campaign. They chose their name in a nod to Mr Rai’s service as the national auditor, which called attention to corruption during a time of Congress party-led government. Now they are a group of 66 employees—compensated volunteers, technically. On third-party websites, they say they are based in Mumbai, which makes them sound pan-Indian and pro-business. In fact their headquarters are in Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat state, where Mr Modi sits as chief minister.
The CAG gives a sideways view into a part of the Modi campaign; what they choose not to say about themselves is at least as interesting as what they do say. At first glance the Indian Republic looks like a neutral arbiter of the day’s news. As well as covering Indian politics, it has sections devoted to the rest of the world, and others for sport, tech and the lives of pop stars. Attractive links to its news articles run on the home-pages of Slate, the Independent,Time and other international clients served by Outbrain, a content-marketing firm. A lot of its articles about, say, the Sochi Olympics, are just cobbled together from the wire agencies (and not attributed). But the Indian Republic’s articles about Mr Modi, the Congress party or the insurgent Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) tend to be written in-house and signed. It might never have run a piece about the other CAG’s finding about corruption in Gujarat’s state-owned enterprises, but what it does run says a great deal about the Modi campaign’s hopes and anxieties. For example, after AAP did very well in the Delhi elections, the Indian Republicbegan highlighting the flaws of its leader, Arvind Kejriwal, with new gusto. When a committee convened by Raghuram Rajan, the new governor of India’s central bank, ranked Gujarat among the country’s less-developed states, the Indian Republic was apoplectic.
This has the effect of making the reader wonder what surreptitious messages might be built into the CAG’s campaign. The last time cadres of the BJP went round the country with donation boxes for a building project was when they were campaigning to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya, on the site of a 16th-century mosque that had been torn down by a Hindu mob in 1992. So it is striking that another CAG offshoot, the Statue of Unitymovement, is going round collecting old iron implements from farms around the country. The idea is to erect a 182-metre statue of Sardar Patel, a Gujarati leader of the independence movement who was known as the Iron Man of India for his stern, no-roadblocks approach to forging a single nation after the partition from Pakistan. His would be the tallest statue in the world, twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, its backers say, built of concrete, clad in recycled iron and facing a gigantic and controversial dam that bears Patel’s name and brings the Narmada river to serve the cities of Gujarat. Mr Modi’s image flashes back and forth with Patel’s in the video.
As it happens Patel hated the Hindu nationalists of his day, but he has since been made a favourite icon of India’s extreme right.
Over tea, Siddharth Mazumdar explains that he and the like-minded group of friends who started CAG have no interest in the divisive tactics of the Hindu hard right. They approached Prashant Kishor, a chief strategist for Mr Modi, early last year, and CAG was born. Mr Mazumdar says he “wanted to see the nerve centre of a political operation” and to help India too. Well-spoken, discursive and idealistic about the mission of the Modi campaign, he does not come off as an ideologue. With a graduate degree from Columbia university in New York, while still in his 20s Mr Mazumdar set aside good job opportunities to hole up in sleepy Gandhinagar.
Mr Mazumdar has a head for wonkish policy debates, and he is inspired by Mr Modi’s ideas about liberalising the national economy, in particular by his Thatcherite slogan, “Government has no business being in business”. He and a colleague, who quit her practice as a lawyer for the duration of the campaign, call themselves “the children of liberalisation”, having grown up in post-1991 India and appreciating its economic dynamism. She thinks that by “removing roadblocks in Gujarat” Mr Modi has shown “how he might unleash potential” for the country as a whole. Both are excited about the sort of activism they have found with CAG, which bypasses the traditional parties’ youth wings. To get into politics as it was, they say, one always needed to have either a pile of cash or family connections. Their group, if they and their friends are any indication, is attracting young professionals who want to see hard work and merit make their mark. Mr Modi wants to empower India by getting it off the dole, they say; and he speaks for all Indians, not just the Hindu majority where he finds his base. Their BJP is a party of the centre-right.
But even here there is a whiff of something that goes unspoken. Mr Mazumdar is at work on a book about the ideas that make Mr Modi his man, ideas which connect the politician to the wisdom of the ancient Vedas, the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, and also famous Indian Muslims like Akbar, not to mention Margaret Thatcher. That sounds broad-minded enough, but then the working title, “Moditva”, carries the strong smell of Hindutva, a doctrine of Hindu supremacy that guides the civic movement that gave birth to the modern BJP. Given Mr Mazumdar’s lack of interest in the pro-Hindu, anti-Muslim politics that characterised the BJP’s approach to campaigns in the 1990s, this seems a curious choice. It is also strange that he regards European movements such as Golden Dawn in Greece and Marine Le Pen’s in France as examples of the good that frustrated young people can do when they organise. Those far-right movements have profited by crisis. And Mr Mazumdar scents opportunity in India’s current financial distress. “In a stressful period,” he says, “you have a good time for an alternative to appear”.
Mr Modi’s campaign wants to appeal to all sorts, as a national campaign must. Along with big business and the urbanising middle classes, that will include the right-wing Hindutva types, as well as the bright young professionals of the cities. The CAG wants mainly to reach the type who want to vote against the incumbent Congress government, which they see as sclerotic and inept, but feel torn between new AAP and Mr Modi’s BJP, which governed Gujarat during a series of massacres in 2002 in which at least a thousand people were killed, most of them Muslim. This must be in part why the CAG tries to avoid looking like anything in particular. Its operatives in Gandhinagar avoid disclosing their address. The group is listed as a Section 25 company, which entitles it to non-profit status, because, as the young lawyer puts it, “there is no traceable link between us and the party”.
A media strategy that makes use of subterfuge—or even the appearance of it—courts suspicion. Borrowing the name “CAG”, until now a trademark for fairness and probity, cannot help. Mr Mazumdar and his colleague seem earnest and forthright in person, and recoil from their association with the groups who want to raise the Ram temple in Ayodhya. They hope their message will reach a great many Indians of their own generation, including many who fear that a vote for Mr Modi would be a vote for an unappealing, covert agenda. Going up against such fears, their group might have an easier time if it were more open about its affiliations.
(Picture credit: Citizens for Accountable Governance)
