It was
over Rs. 150 crore for the ‘India Shining’ campaign in 2004. It was around Rs.
200 crore for the ‘Bharat Nirman’ campaign in 2009. Figures available till
February 2012 show the UPA-2 government has already spent Rs. 2246 crore on
advertisements.
To
begin the campaign season formally, the government recently re-launched the
‘Bharat Nirman’ campaign with a reported budget of Rs 35 crore for an initial
run of 15 days. Overall, the Javed Akhtar-Pradeep Sarkar output is expected to
cost a whopping Rs. 180 crore.
But,
for the UPA and the Congress party, the picture is not as rosy as it was in
2009.
The
Congress party led UPA-2 government that is completing four years in office on
May 22 has become synonymous with corruption. Scams like 2G spectrum
allocation, coal blocks allocation, Commonwealth Games, many Defence deal scams
and scams in projects that helped the UPA-1 win the 2009 elections like the farm
debt waiver and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act have created an
abysmally low credibility scenario for the government.
With the
forced ouster of the two cabinet ministers, Ashwani Kumar from the Law &
Justice ministry and Pawan Kumar Bansal, from the Railway ministry, the debates
on the possibility of early General Elections, otherwise to be scheduled around
May 2014, have got a step-up.
The
only breather for the Congress party and the UPA is the absence of a united and
clean opposition. The major opposition party BJP just lost the Karnataka
assembly elections fought on the main issue of corruption, to the Congress.
Important regional parties like Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party,
Nationalist Congress Party, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam, Rashtriya Jatna Dal, Janta Dal (United), have had history of
corruption with tainted leaders.
Also,
in spite of growing corruption allegations and involvement of the UPA members
in scams, the Congress party has been able to win assembly elections of Assam,
Kerala, Manipur, Puducherry, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya
and now Karnataka in the second term of the UPA when the political and
bureaucratic corruption have touched the newer heights. That makes the Congress
strategists think that the ‘public memory is short and it can easily be
swept away in the impulse of the moment’.
The
strategy makers in the Congress party believe the populist schemes focusing on
the rural India and marginalized population segments of the urban India could
still help the Congress party win over the upcoming elections in case of a
fractured opposition.
And so,
the Congress party has already started working, in full throttle, on its
campaign for the General Election 2014 with the launch of ‘Bharat Nirman’
version-2.
But,
going by the indications and the negative sentiments against the Congress, its many
leaders including Manmohan Singh as well as against the ‘Gandhis’ after the
alleged Robert Vadra cover-ups, ‘Bharat Nirman’, this time, may well prove to
be the UPA’s very own ‘India Shining’.
After
all, every Javed Akhtar and every Pradeep Sarkar creation has not been a hit.
They have had their share of duds.