EC: Surrogate advertising tactics spill over into political campaigns

Surrogate advertising has businesses subtly promoting products that are proscribed by showcasing other goods using the brand's name, logo and essence. Consumers subliminally know what the businesses are really selling - say, alcoholic beverages - even as they register the 'literal' promotion of products, say, soda water, whose advertising is kosher.

Such surrogate tactics have been cropping up of late in the election arena. West Bengal's leader of opposition, for instance, at a campaign rally last Saturday, told the gathered crowd in Bengali, 'Early next week, there'll be such a bomb dropped that Trinamool will be totally knocked off balance.' Now, one can read 'bomb' figuratively - perhaps as a very disruptive voting pattern. But in violence-wracked Bengal, 'bomb' can be read very literally by those who choose to.

Similarly, the prime minister reminded voters at a rally in Rajasthan how a former Congress PM had, in 2006, stated that Muslims have the 'first claim on [the country's] resources', and that Congress now plans to redistribute India's resources 'to those who have more children, to infiltrators'.


Manmohan Singh had, indeed, stated that his government planned 'to devise innovative plans to ensure that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to share equitably in the fruits of development. They must have the first claims on resources.' But decontextualised messaging has turned an old affirmative action plan into a surrogate call for something else.

Perhaps EC should pay more heed to how such double entendres could be dangerously (mis)interpreted in a charged poll atmosphere. And rein in such rhetoric.