 Can PK make the Congress okay? That's the question we are asking today because Prashant Kishore is going to be part of the Congress's campaign for 2024. And he's had a very good record in pushing parties beyond that victory line. And he did that with Narendra Modi in 2014. He did that with the miraculous alliance between Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar, two old foes who came together to win Bihar in 2015. He did that with the Congress in Punjab, failed in UP in 2017, but he did an amazing job. Lot of credit has been given to him for Mamata Banerjee's recent win in West Bengal, where the BJP was almost at the door knocking on the door. Many people said it could take over West Bengal, but Prashant Kishore strategized, worked out the messaging, worked out the micro details of that campaign and Mamata Banerjee won. He made a presentation to the Congress Party last year and there was a lot of speculation that he might either join or take over the Congress Party's assembly campaign for Goa Punjab, UP and the ones which recently went to elections. That didn't work out, they parted ways. Now there's talk that he's coming back and there's a presentation that's doing the rounds amongst journalists, which is supposedly Prashant Kishore's 2021 presentation to the Congress Party, to Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. I cannot vouch for its authenticity, but people who have covered the Congress Party for a long time know Prashant Kishore, tell me that this is authentic and I got a copy of it. The core thing which you already probably know is that Prashant Kishore recommends that there has to be a non-Gandhi working president of the Congress Party. What he means is that if Sonia Gandhi continues to be the president of the Congress Party, there at least has to be a non-Gandhi working president who directly reports to her, but has all the authority to deal with everyone else and the two other Gandhis, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, actually don't deal with the nitty gritties of the Party at all. Rahul Gandhi recommends becomes the head of the parliamentary board, which as you know doesn't have many people, just a few MPs in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. So he keeps there, but he also is one of the faces for the Congress's campaign. And there's Priyanka Gandhi, another face for the Congress campaign, who would head the Coordination Committee, which would coordinate between the Party leadership, the Working Committee and all Congress workers. That is the role he has for the Gandhis. The Gandhis are there because they're brands, I'm assuming that's the reason, and because they cannot be removed that easily, but he's delegating parts of it and pushing a non-Gandhi into the top leadership of the Congress Party. In fact, he has in that presentation, he says that for most of the Congress Party's history, till the emergence of Indira Gandhi, there were Congress presidents changed regularly every two to three years. Since then it has not happened. So that is one key thing he says, he has two suggestions that even the president can be a non-Gandhi, but he says that that is very difficult to achieve. Its impact is very high, something which is relatively easier to achieve, but the impact is moderate, is to have a non-Gandhi as a working president of the Congress Party and a non-Gandhi as the chairperson of the UPA or the Coordination with other parties. So those are the key things that you get. Along with that, he says that the Congress organization has to be completely overwhelmed. It is essentially dominated. The leadership is dominated by people who have not won elections, who either lost it and have been nominated to the Rajya Sabha or simply haven't even fought elections for years. So he says that they have to go. There has to be one party, one ticket rule, one family, one ticket rule in the Congress Party, which ensures that people from established Congress families don't automatically get tickets to fight elections. And even if they lose, then they end up in the Congress Working Committee or some Congress post. So he's essentially saying there has to be direct elections for at least 50% of the office bearers. The organization has to be expanded dramatically. Elections have to be held. Those who win elections have to be brought in. The organization itself should be in a way representative of the demographics of the country. So if 50% of voters are women or more are women, then there has to be that many in the representatives in the organization itself. It should represent the youth, the poor, SC, ST minorities exactly or more or less in the way in which the demographics of the country is, according to the census of India. Now, these are things that are difficult to achieve, but obviously he's saying that this will take time, but it has to be done. This is one of the key parts of his suggestion. Now, he says the Congress has to target about 40 to 45% of the vote shed to come to power. And that means about 30 crore votes. Where will those 30 crore votes come from? And there are two tables where you can see that most of it he expects about, I would say 55 to 60% of those 30 crore votes he expects to come from minorities, from Dalits and from Adivasis. That's what is the core of the Congress party's catchment area, which he believes from where the votes will come. And as you go up the ladder, if you see upper cast and OBCs, Prashant Kishore does not expect much support for the Congress party. In terms of income groups, he expects a bulk, again 55 to 60% of the votes to come from the very poor, the poor, and the lower middle class. And again, even when you come to the lower middle class, the proportion of votes that he expects is actually lower than the votes that he expects overall. So bulk of the votes, again, he expects to come from the poor and the very poor who earn anywhere between 100 to 200, less than 100 to 250 rupees per day. That's the catchment area again. And he acknowledges that as you go up the ladder, whether it's the middle class, whether it's the upper middle class and the rich, the Congress party actually cannot expect to do, get more than 20, 25% of the vote in that space. Now, other than that, he also identifies eight core catchment areas for demographic zones from which the Congress needs to get most of its votes. Number one is women. He identifies women as the strongest group in which the Congress can get votes. Other than that, he identifies landless laborers, farmers, the urban poor, the middle class as well, and the youth, the unemployed youth. In fact, if you look at the breakup he makes between the age group, age group-wise, breakup he makes as to what the Congress can expect in terms of votes, most of it is amongst older people or younger people between 18 to 25. The 25 to 35 age group he more or less assumes the Congress cannot get. This is an interesting point because he assumes that there is a degree of angst amongst the younger lot who are unemployed, which the Congress can tap into and get votes. Now, how do you target these eight core groups? You do it with targeted ways of messaging and reaching them. There are four M's he talks about, which is messenger, messaging, machinery and mechanism. By messenger, he means that you need to find some charismatic people who are icons who will speak to those specific target groups, women who are popular amongst women, Dalit leaders or popular amongst Dalit leaders, rural landless laborers. There might be people who landless laborers look up to. So take these icons who are opposed to the government or opposed to the NDA, who you have to identify and use as iconic charismatic messengers. The message itself, the messaging itself has to be targeted to each group and each locality, micro messaging in detail. Then comes the machinery. The machinery means that you need a large group of foot soldiers. You need a big digital footprint to convert that message into votes. And finally, you need a mechanism. That mechanism essentially is the entire system through which all of these will be coordinated and the message, the outreach will be converted into final electoral victories. Now Prashant Kishore recognizes that the Congress has very little chance of getting backing from the mainstream traditional media that he says is more or less controlled by the government and by the BJP. So very little chance of making any inroads there. But he does point out that even there the Congress does not actually look at data or science to do its messaging. It does it at the wrong time. It puts all its resources in the last few weeks where it's too late to convert people to go and vote for the Congress at the voting booth. So he says that it has to be essentially the digital platforms which the Congress has to rely on. It has to create an ecosystem of YouTube channels, digital networks. It has to depend on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media. It has to create WhatsApp groups in every single village, a single WhatsApp group, integrated, vertically integrated in every single village. People have to be reached through phone calls, I'm assuming, because there is an entire table put out which says that so many users to be reached through their phones. So there is that digital outreach which he's talking about which has to be done because the Congress does not have space in traditional media or even in television. And one of the ways in which to do that he's saying is to use local comedians, stand-up comedians who people watch, use them, those who are ideologically aligned to the Congress party, use that workout memes, create tweets, social media posts and lots of articles, lots of publications which are aligned, local publications which might be aligned to the Congress that those have to be tapped. He also gives you outdoor messaging systems that are important like for instance hoardings, all paintings, things like that. He says that the Congress has to put out 1 crore square feet of hoardings to publicize its message and this is what brings me to the great big hole in this presentation and Prashant Kishore's, at least its public presentation that we are getting to see, that we are getting to know which is I called up a few people to find out how much it costs to put up a hoarding in Delhi for instance. And it worked out to about 1250 rupees per square foot per week. Now think about it, Delhi is obviously very expensive, smaller towns will be one-tenth that, Mumbai might be more, the metros will be somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of what Delhi is. So I would say that one can assume that the average would come to about one-fifth of Delhi's cost. Now imagine 1 crore square feet for one week at 250 rupees, that's 250 crore rupees for just one week of hoardings, 1 crore square feet of hoardings. Now Prashant Kishore says that there should be 5 crore Congress members out of which 2.5 crores will be active members. Now let us assume that each active member has to be given 10 rupees per day, which is nothing for their own expenses, which means that they still have to spend a lot of money out of their own pocket. So 2.5 crore people have to be given just 10 rupees to maybe fill a part of their petrol, some amount of tea, something that they are going at a tea stall, they are buying tea for everyone. 10 rupees per day for 2.5 crore people is 25 crore rupees a day over 2 years, 25 crore rupees a day for over 2 years for just your active worker. Forget about the hoardings, forget about your costs of putting up, bringing stand-up comedians to do things, putting up YouTube channels, your cost of your messaging, the cost of organizing all these yatra's, adivations, door-to-door camping, forget all of that. I am just saying this little bit is going to cost 25 crores a day if it is just 10 rupees per person, per active Congress worker. Prashant Kishore has a very interesting idea to counter the government's freebies, which are closely associated with the Prime Minister's persona. He says that each Congress worker needs to do 5 acts of kindness per year, per out to 5 families around them. So with that, they will be able to reach 12.5 crore families, 2.5 crore workers, Congress workers reaching 12.5 crore families and Prashant Kishore right at the beginning tells us, and again I am saying Prashant Kishore, this is a presentation which could be Prashant Kishore's, he might deny that this was his in the first place. He says that there are 3.2 voters on an average per household, so essentially you reach 40 crore people out of which you have to, these are direct door-to-door reach, outreach through kindness. So what does that kindness mean, that's not spelt out, but that kindness would probably involve some amount of spending. So I am not even looking at that 40 crore people to be reached through some kindness in the year, I am not even looking at what that cost would be to do a simple bit of act of kindness. Some of it would be free, but some of it would cost some money and therefore this is the key big hole that Prashant Kishore's presentation had, where will the money come from? The Congress party doesn't currently have money. It will need anywhere between 20,000 crore to 25,000 crore to fight the elections on that scale that Prashant Kishore is asking for. Even if I am conservative, at least 10,000 crore. It declared in Prashant Kishore's own presentation, it says that the Congress declared about 918 crore of income in 2018-19. So even if that has gone up and we have no reason to believe that, there is no clear plan where the Congress will get the money from to implement this vision. How will it do it? Where will it get the people for all those foot soldiers? Why would people turn to the Congress? Yes, the leadership can go ahead and try it, but if the leadership is already disconnected from the people, how can they convert and go to people and convert them towards the Congress? So there are these holes in Congress, Prashant Kishore's presentation, which are the serious issues that Prashant Kishore will have to explain to the Congress party and perhaps some of it is not going to be in a presentation. Some of it will probably explain off the record that how do you raise money? Because after all, Prashant Kishore took the Trinimal Congress to Goa and fought elections. Some amount of money was used in Resbingol and in Goa, where the Trinimal Congress in Goa had virtually no chance, but it managed to convert a few people to its call. So there has to be a way for the Congress to raise those funds. Prashant Kishore's own admission says that the rich will not vote for the Congress, the upper middle class will not vote for the Congress, the upper class will not vote for the Congress. So it seems that that hole is difficult to fill because the money lies with these people. Why would they give that to the Congress? That's the question that Prashant Kishore and the Congress needs to answer. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick, like us, subscribe to us and do share this video.