High drama erupted in the small hours of a suspense-filled January day in Kolkata.
Masked officers of the Enforcement Directorate swept into the glossy offices of I-PAC (Indian Political Action Committee), one of the country’s leading political consultancies.
They hauled away computers and files as the stunned staff looked on.
Mamata Banerjee, then the Bengal chief minister and leader of the state’s governing party, rushed to the scene and walked out with several files.
She complained to the reporters at the site that the “politically motivated” raid was being orchestrated by Delhi to steal information on her Trinamool Congress party’s election strategy and potential candidate lists for the 2026 state Assembly elections scheduled later in the year.
Television channels played on loop the drama of one mystery-filled “green file” she had walked out with, in this latest episode of Banerjee’s running battles with the Centre.
It was only the beginning of I-PAC’s woes – and Banerjee’s – as the Bharatiya Janata Party dispensation in the Centre was closing in on her.
It unleashed federal probe and regulatory agencies like the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation to break her aides and financiers, flew in top BJP leaders and ace workers for the campaign, and poured money like water for the April election.
Simultaneously, through the Special Intensive Revision under a pliant Election Commission, it made sure that the state’s 27% Muslims – who used to rally behind Banerjee fearing the BJP’s Hindu supremacist politics – were strategically whittled down in the electoral list.
The war on I-PAC was a surgical strike on the Trinamool Congress’s campaign machine delivered on top of these multiple strategies to break Banerjee’s 15-year grip on power in Bengal.
A few months later, the Enforcement Directorate would arrest I-PAC’s co-founder and director on a money laundering case just two weeks before the election in April.
Narendra Modi eventually got what he wanted, and the BJP won a landslide with a two-thirds majority in the state Assembly, his strategies of vote capture complemented by the strong undercurrent of aversion for Banerjee’s party for its pervading corruption and thuggery.
Job done, the I-PAC director was released on bail by a court the very day after the state election concluded.
The Enforcement Directorate did not even oppose the bail in court this time.
Thus ended the reign of Banerjee whose supposedly well-knit grass-roots organisation almost made her invincible, till she wasn’t.
It would seem odd that a consulting firm would be so central to a political party with what looked like a high level of organisational coherence.
But it presents a stark reality of the deepening global recession of democracy: the professionalisation of politics with the withering of mass political parties.
As foundational institutions of democratic governance, political parties worldwide are experiencing organisational decay and popular disengagement, eroding their capacity for connecting citizens to the state and political processes.
As parties are becoming ever more dependent on big money while grass-roots party organisations such as unions and associations decline as primary sources of funding and mobilisation, political accountability shifts from party constituents to shadowy patrons and technocrats.
And politics increasingly moves from volunteer-driven social activism to specialised, expert-managed campaigns driven by data analytics, public relations strategies and digital marketing.
Political consultancies are the key in mediating this transition.
They provide voter databases, targeted messaging strategies, ground‑level micro‑campaigning and organisational planning – functions that would once be considered the domain of political parties but which are now too incapacitated to perform these themselves.
Consultancies even find and rent crowds to attend rallies to help parties and leaders project popularity.
In this managerialisation of politics, corporate management ideologies, techniques, and values replace ideological contestation and elections come to resemble corporate marketing campaigns rather than battles of ideas.
Nothing screams crisis of democracy louder than political parties having to pay consultants to tell them what voters want.
Political consultancies have now become an integral part of India’s party politics.
Most parties not only work with consultants, they have also themselves created in-house consultancy-like wings staffed with professionals, often drawn from consulting firms.
In December 2022, police in Hyderabad raided the office of a consulting firm handling the Telangana Congress’s “war room”.
They were clearly doing a great job – the Congress came to power in Telangana within a year.
The Trinamool Congress, which also created an in-house consultancy, similarly came to depend on I-PAC to provide it the party’s technical core that made the crackdown such a crippling blow.
Dark money and demagogues It was the 2014 general election that marked the beginning of the rise of political consultancies in a major way.
Modi himself benefited hugely from a professionalised campaign modelled on the US presidential strategies, primarily focusing on the person of the candidate rather than the party’s programmes.
The pioneering consultancy co-founded by political strategist Prashant Kishor that managed Modi’s campaign revolutionised Indian elections with data-driven outreach, voter analytics, booth-level mapping and social media drive; Kishor’s team later evolved into I-PAC that was consulting Banerjee.
In a country with poor campaign finance laws, this managerial invasion of politics has grave cost implications for campaigns, and in turn, for its democracy.
Indian elections are now among the costliest in the world.
In India’s 2019 general election, campaign spending reached $7.2 billion surpassing the $6.5 billion spent in the 2016 US presidential and congressional elections put together – despite India’s per capita income being just 3% of that of the United States.
Election campaigns were never cheap, but when professional managers and specialists replace voluntary political workers, somebody has to foot the additional bill.
With the decline of traditional sources of party funds such as trade unions and membership subscriptions, parties have become even more dependent on business fat cats to meet the rising expenses.
This not only makes parties more accountable to financial patrons than their constituencies, it also tilts the balance decisively in favour of politicians with access to pots of money, affecting the quality of representation.
Elite capture is exacerbated, adding to the already debilitating pathologies of poor internal democracy that has long characterised the institutional weakening of Indian political parties.
The end of the party Party deficiencies such as the absence of mobilising organisations embedded in society have contributed to the distancing between people and political parties that lies at the core of the worldwide loss of public trust in politicians and governments.
It is manifested in Gen Z movements from Madagascar to Nepal, and most recently in India itself, where a meme-inspired “cockroach movement” against the country’s broken public examination system forced Modi to accept the resignation of his education minister.
Gen Z movements have thus stepped into the void left by hollow parties.
In The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld describe US political parties as hard shells lacking internal cohesion and positive loyalties, failing to link citizens to governments or build governing coalitions.
The book traces this hollowness through over 200 years and concludes that party weakening in the US accelerated since the 1970s, when external groups started filling the void in the political parties.
This happened as the Vietnam war, stagflation, and the 1960s civil rights revolution ended the union-boosting New Deal order of regulated capitalism and welfare expansion that once helped mass parties....
