Durga Prasad, an 80-year-old farmer, was resting under the shade of a tree outside his house when the party members arrived. An app on their smartphones could tell them in an instant who Mr Prasad was, who they might vote for – and why they should be grateful to India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
“You receive payments of 2,000 rupees, right? asked a local official from Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Mr. Prasad agreed. He receives $72 a year from a welfare program for farmers launched and promoted by Mr. Modi.
“Are you getting rations?” » the official then asked, even though he already knew the answer. He had made his point.
Such gifts are among the most distinctive elements of Mr. Modi’s mass appeal. The country’s new airports, diplomatic prestige and booming stock markets may sound like Mr Modi’s calling card, but for the 95% of Indians who earn too little to file their income taxes, small injections of cash and household items matter more. And Mr. Modi’s party is set up to make the most of it in national elections that conclude early next month.
India’s social programs are far-reaching and far-reaching. Under the larger scheme, 821 million Indians are eligible for five-kilogram (11-pound) bags of free rice or wheat every month. The government began distributing grain to fight hunger at the start of the pandemic and has since committed $142 billion to the program. Mr. Modi’s face began appearing on the bags in January.
Another program launched by the Prime Minister has helped people build 15 million homes since 2015, at a cost of $3 billion a year; Home improvements and additions are also covered. The government has also funded millions of toilets and is working to provide clean water to every household.
The foundations of this expanded welfare system were laid soon after Mr Modi became prime minister in 2014. Bank accounts, also marked “PM”, became available to all Indians who lacked them, as part of a universal identification program launched by the previous government. .
The accounts provided the state with valuable information about the financial lives of even its poorest citizens. And they have paved the way for “direct benefit transfers,” money that bypasses the sometimes corrupt local officials who once doled out welfare — appearing instead to come from Mr. Modi himself.
These transfers reached $76 billion during the last fiscal year. But Mr Modi’s budgets have not become excessive. This is partly because government spending on education and health – long-term investments – has declined in terms of its share of the economy as signature social programs have proliferated. Spending on the guaranteed employment program associated with Mr Modi’s opponents has also fallen.
Whatever the motivation behind them, the tangible food and household benefits prioritized by Mr. Modi have eased Indians’ pain as the economy slowed before the pandemic, collapsed during its first year, then recovered unevenly. The Hindu nationalist government distributes aid equally among all religious groups, although it does not receive many votes from some of them.
These aids are perhaps the most powerful thing Mr. Modi can invoke when he takes credit for improving the lives of his fellow Indians, hundreds of millions of whom remain desperate for reliable jobs and well paid.
Vinod Misra, the local BJP leader who recently visited Mr. Prasad in Amethi, a district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, explained that in the poorest places where people once starved, ” our party works especially for programs that affect everyone.”
“All we have to do is go and tell the family, ‘Brother, this roof of yours, who made it possible?’ ” said Mr. Misra.
In a country where 80 percent of the population is rural or poor, people are very serious about getting something in return for their votes, said Pradeep Gupta, director of Axis My India, a voting company. survey. If a politician keeps his promises, “the people elect you again and again,” Mr. Gupta said. Everything else is “marketing”.
The BJP’s voter tracking is the end result of a gargantuan effort that leverages its core of ideologically committed members, its funding, its nationwide organizing and, increasingly, its sophisticated data management.
In the temple town of Pushkar, west of Amethi, in the Hindi-speaking “cow belt” that is a BJP stronghold, another local party member explained the virtue of an app called Saral. With a few taps and taps, the worker, Shakti Singh Rathore, shared a bird’s eye view of his neighbors, whom he intended to gather for Mr. Modi.
There are 241 “polling booths”, or polling stations, in the Pushkar constituency, each with its own mapped boundaries. Mr. Rathore quickly opened the information of one of the stalls he was overseeing. Its targets were not only voters, but also beneficiaries, or “labharthis” – an important new term of art in grassroots campaigning.
“The names of the labharthis are all listed here,” Mr. Rathore said. A man he named had received a bottle of cooking gas – “here’s his address, postcode and telephone number”. Another had received money from the Farmers’ Welfare Program.
“All the data is here,” Mr. Rathore said.
Anyone can download Saral through the Apple or Google Play stores for campaign updates, although only enlisted BJP workers can explore its databases. The party’s national leadership said it was using Saral to connect more than six million of its workers. They can both retrieve and download voter and beneficiary data.
Voters do not seem bothered, or at least not surprised, that so much information about their relationship with the national government is passed door to door by political workers.
Mr Misra said he did not know exactly how all the personal information got into the app. Other local workers said they assumed the data was provided by the government itself, given its accuracy. Amit Malviya, the BJP’s chief information and technology officer, told a kickoff conference in December that the 30 terabytes of data had been collected manually by the party over the last 10 elections.
Saral does a lot of other things that are helpful to the group’s ground game. It tracks workers’ outreach efforts and measures them against each other based on their performance, effectively “gamifying” the hard work of canvassing.
It also gives workers the opportunity to help make it easier for voters to access their benefits, blurring the line between partisan politics and government work.
Mr. Modi himself told a television crew this month that he had asked party members to collect information on voters who had not received their benefits and to “assure them that it is the Modi guarantee – they will get it in my third term.”
Ajay Singh Gaur, a BJP worker who accompanied Mr. Misra during the visit to Amethi, found himself embroiled in a lengthy exchange with Dinesh Maurya, a farmer who complained that a faulty electric wire had fallen on his Wheat field.
“My entire crop was burned and I did not receive a single piece of compensation,” Mr. Maurya said.
Mr. Gaur assured Mr. Maurya that he would return the money the state owed him. “I spoke to the officer in charge” of the plant, he said. “I will do it.”
Mujib Mashal reports contributed.
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