The Hindu Business Line : Where politics and business meet

Politics broke into our lives conspicuously last week with elections in five States. Familiar themes and debates surfaced again about national parties being a dying species and coalitions even at the State level as the likely future. In Tamil Nadu, too, a minority government with outsiders' support has appeared, as elsewhere. One sees many strange parallels in this with the world of business.

Inter-dependency

In a democracy, politics and business have always needed each other. The former is about power, but needs the money to realise it; the latter may seem chiefly about money but has to consort with power to make its presence secure. Both need the willing participation of the citizen as voter or customer, who has a near perfect freedom of choice, at least in theory. She is wooed and courted through much the same media, appeal to psychology, sentiment and passion, lure of freebies, movie stars and celebrity endorsement.

Marketing and electioneering are both called campaigns, the battle is more than metaphorical, and the stunning scale of spending is on the rise every year. Cynics and activists naturally would have very different perspectives and comments on all this, as befits an open society.

Any party trying to capture several regions has problems similar to the marketer trying to promote a model nationally. By definition, scale is important for an all-India presence, and that in turn demands standardisation. Yet, as marketers have long realised, India is an intractable coalition of consumer groups and markets, of various modern day clans and tribes. It is much less a homogenous whole than in many other countries including the US and Japan. Yet, in the more advanced societies, as with markets, the contest eventually becomes a two-horse race, favourites neck-and-neck, and little else besides.

The striking differences

In the subcontinent however, there are not only vast differences in tastes and habits, but also quite varied attitudes to the fundamentals of life itself — security, self-orientation, individualism, thrift, hard work, spending on luxuries and so on. This makes it impossibly difficult to position a brand uniformly across the country. Paradoxically, though the more evolved the media, more the channels; and a national campaign is more attractive. Yet, it can come a cropper, as the `India Shining' slogan did.

As the population has continued to grow, the smaller segments or parties have grown astronomically, and are niches only in name. The marketing map has to be constantly updated for policymakers in both business and government to think in terms of sub-regions, in every State. Alternatively, one may well progress towards numerous smaller units as many opinion makers have been advocating.

The reality

Thus, when the DMK once called for autonomy for the States and a coalition of regional parties at the Centre, some thought this talk bordered on the secessionist. It is today's reality. The DMK founder C. N. Annadurai must be laughing, wherever he is now. What the current election results have also shown is that now this farsighted prescription had better be taken one step further — to coalitions in State governments, which must mean that greater autonomy must logically devolve upon much smaller units, districts or perhaps even panchayats?

(Feedback can be sent to srchander23@netscape.net)

S. Ramachander

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