Both Sides Are Running the Same Play, that too on a treadmill
Within the same fortnight, the ruling side replaced the team that runs its content, and the opposition tried to convert a student campaign into a movement. Opposite jerseys, one instinct: manufacture a crowd. But the mobilisation that shook the government this year was built by no one, and that is a fact neither war room can afford to see.
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Earlier this summer, during the same two weeks, two very different groups had the same idea.
On one side, commentators supporting the government looked back on a tough two weeks: a union minister was forced to resign, young people took to the streets, and social media was full of jokes and memes at their expense. They decided the problem was a weak narrative. Their content just wasn't strong enough. Instead of responding with a solid story, they relied on their own memes and deflection, and it didn't work. Their solution was clear: create a better narrative, tell a stronger story, and keep up with the competition. A few weeks later, they acted on it in the most literal way possible, replacing Amit Malviya, who had run the party's social media operation for over a decade, and bringing in a new team.
In the same two weeks, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition, saw an opportunity. He had already launched a student campaign called "Chhatron Ki Goonj", driven by anger over the leaked exam papers that sparked the protests. At that point, he wrote to party leaders at all levels, instructing them to turn the campaign into a nationwide movement, go to campuses, show his speeches, and promote the message everywhere; he also organised a protest outside the Prime Minister's residence.
Both groups, on opposite sides, had the same reaction. They witnessed a movement that shook the government and decided to create their own version.
This shared instinct is their main strategy, and both sides are using it.
One play, two jerseys
The play is old and shared, and for a decade it worked for whoever ran it best. It goes like this. You decide the message. You build what carries it: the war room, the IT cell, the party volunteer lists, the WhatsApp groups, the paid influencer network, the district structure. You push the message out, or you find a rising wave and paddle out in front of it, and you count the crowd that gathers, and the size of the crowd is the score.
This is manufactured mobilisation, not a tactic. It is their entire theory of how politics works: that you can build a crowd you can dictate to, decide, push, and count. Every political party in the country runs some version of it, and the argument between them has only ever been about who does it better, whose war room is larger, whose content is sharper, whose volunteers are more numerous, whose trolls are most abusive, whose influencers have more reach. None of them has questioned the play itself. Why would they? Because it is the only thing they are all good at.
Every accusation is a confession
What's interesting is that each side sees the other as manipulative, while believing it is simply a victim trying to tell the truth.
The ruling party sees its opponents as a well-organised ecosystem, a toolkit gang, a coordinated narrative operation, possibly a foreign-influenced group of antinationals spinning stories to destabilise a government that is just trying to do its job with absolute honesty. In their view, their own messages are not narratives but simply facts, shared to correct this misinformation.
The opposition sees the ruling party in a similar way, but reversed: as using anonymous accounts, paid trolls, and a massive propaganda operation to manipulate the public. In their view, their own campaign is not propaganda but a way to give people a voice for their real concerns.
Both sides are partly right about each other, but completely wrong about themselves. They both see that the other is running a manufactured operation, but don't realise they're describing their own reflection. Their solution is always the same: if the other side is telling a stronger story, we need to tell ours even louder. The answer is always to build more.
The crowd nobody built
But there's something both sides are missing.
The movement that worried the government this year wasn't organised by any single entity. There was no war room, no budget, no teams, no lists of party volunteers, no paid influencers, and no leader giving orders. It started with a Chief Justice of India's offhand insult that turned into a joke, then a symbol, and soon hundreds of thousands of people who had never been organised before were acting together. A minister even lost his job. The biggest political movement of the year had no clear leader.
This fact undermines the whole strategy, and both sides are trying hard not to face it. If a huge movement can happen without their efforts, then their usual methods have been beaten by something that came from nowhere. Building a bigger version of what already failed won't solve the problem, but it's the only approach they know.
Louder is a tell
Let's look at the ruling party's approach first. Their solution is to produce more content, make it sharper, make it younger, and push their story even harder. But the more forcefully they push, the more obvious it becomes that they're trying to sell a narrative. The younger generation sees this as being lectured to rather than persuaded. As I've written before, political content that talks down to people on these platforms doesn't convince anyone; it just gets mocked and shared back. Making more of it only gives the other side more material to use.
You cannot order a movement
The opposition's approach is subtler and more disappointing because they almost understand the situation, yet still make the same mistake.
Instead of building anything of its own, the opposition is trying to absorb the self-propelled youth movement. They want to lead them, be seen at the front, and turn the energy from the streets into an organisation that can win elections. That's why they sent the letter and told their teams to reach out to campuses. But real movements can't be created by instructions. As soon as a party structure and familiar leaders get involved, the movement loses its spark. Young people can spot this kind of effort easily because they're used to seeing through it.
There's an even bigger mistake here. When the opposition leader calls on young people to defend the Constitution, he's doing the same thing the ruling party did when it told young people who to respect. Both sides are putting words in young people's mouths, creating scripts in rooms where they aren't present, and asking them to perform. It's the same strategy, just with different branding. The movement that happened this year didn't wait for anyone to tell it what to stand for, and that's exactly why it worked.
The crowd comes first now
At the core, both sides share one unexamined belief: that the crowd comes after the message. They think that if they create and push the right message, people will follow. All their tools and strategies are built around this idea.
But this generation flipped that very idea. The crowd came together on its own, driven by a shared feeling, and the message came from the crowd, not the other way around. By the time either side responded, the movement was already underway and had developed its own language. That's why both sides seem slow and out of touch. They're trying to start something in front of a crowd that's already moving and doesn't want to be led.
The field they are forfeiting
This has a cost, and it is not far off. The space both sides are failing to fill will not stay empty; in politics, it never does. The one move neither of them will make, to stop pushing and try to understand what moved these people, is the opening through which the next movement will come. So the play does not just stop working. It hands the field to whoever is not running it. And that will not be any political party. It will be the next crowd that builds itself, and the one after that.
A play they cannot put down
So that's the situation now. Both sides keep using the same strategy, even though it no longer works, and neither is willing to stop. When one of them answered its worst fortnight in years by replacing the team that runs its content, it changed the players, not the play. That is the whole problem in a single decision.
They can't stop because everything they have is designed for this approach. War rooms are made to broadcast, not to listen. Party structures are set up to send messages down, not to hear what's coming up. IT cells can create thousands of posts, but can't understand individual people. The only thing that would really connect with this generation, trying to understand what inspired the movement instead of trying to control it, is something neither side is prepared to do.
The first party to stop using this old strategy could gain a huge advantage, but that's exactly why no one will. The people in charge are valued for how well they run the current system. The crowd that forced a minister to resign is still out there. Both sides are busy planning how to lead it without realising that it doesn’t want either of them to lead.