The Biggest Challenge for Challengers of Modi is.......

Cash!!!

I track election campaigns across the country and I think the biggest challenge for Modi's challengers is easy access to finance. With none of the polls giving the Congress and other left of centre parties a ghost of a chance of winning 2019, raising money to fight elections in 2019 will be a huge problem. Why is cash needed?

• Advertising
• Paying party workers for canvassing
• Campaign expenses on events and travel
• Paying off local leaders/thugs etc
• Paying off voters (CSDS survey says 12% were offered money or foods or other rewards, could be high or low)
• Paying other candidates to ensure own votes are preserved or opponents votes are cut

During Demonetisation period, except for the BJP, the rest of the parties had slowed down on campaign expenditure. BJP has the biggest 'white money' war chest. I donot wish to comment on black money war chests of any party. All I can say is white money is peanuts compared to black money deployed. The money advantage helped the BJP significantly while damaging the BSP quite a bit.

The way financiers operate is that they expect favours once the party comes to power or has a good chance of coming to power. The reliance on financiers is the highest amongst parties that donot have a party oriented cadre. So if polls or anecdotal evidence indicates that a party has little chance of coming to power, financiers are quite reluctant to fund or fund in really small amounts while funding the winning party quite significantly. This would mean that non-BJP parties will need to go back to candidates with lot of money who wish to compete for a variety of reasons and not just winning the election. Rich candidates are not necessarily the most competitive, in other words, candidate selection alone is likely to be the biggest collateral damage of poor availability of cash for non-BJP parties. In 2019, the opposition will rely a lot on private TV coverage - more press conferences, dharnas, padayatras or anything that is not very expensive. They will also rely a lot more on social media coverage as the side effects are on Television which has much higher reach. Either way, money availability and therefore campaign strategy will be quite severely hindered for most opposition parties in 2019.

This alone puts severe pressure on the opposition to come up with an alternate ideological narrative (cannot be NOT BJP) and a clear leadership offer (Cannot be NOT MODI) for 2019. They will also need to firm up alliances early rather than late to enable voters understand the narrative and the alternative choices They will need to do this by July 2018 once there is visibility on the Monsoon. Lastly, the opposition is dreaming if they hope to win 2019 without middle class votes. The middle class vote bank is only expanding and assuming it is only 20% and votes 60% in favor of BJP, that is still 30-40% of the BJP Vote. Unless they gain votes here, 2019 will truly decided by Monsoon 2018.