Political consulting has become a defining feature of India’s electoral landscape. Campaign strategy, voter research, organizational design, digital mobilization and narrative coherence are now recognized forms of political labour. This reflects a basic fact of mass democracy: Complex societies generate specialized political work. The question, therefore, is not whether political consulting belongs in India’s democracy, but how it should be ethically and institutionally situated within it. The recent raids on the IPAC office in Kolkata have brought that question into sharper focus.
Political consulting develops in relation to political architecture. Presidential systems with long campaign cycles and expansive private fundraising have produced large consulting industries operating alongside parties. Parliamentary democracies embed consulting within clear institutional boundaries, where expertise supports rather than substitutes party authority. These differences flow from how power, money and legitimacy organize themselves.
India’s democratic environment is unusually complex. Scale, social diversity, and electoral competition coexist with uneven institutional capacity. Professional consulting has strengthened this ecosystem by bringing organizational discipline to campaigns, improving coherence and opening pathways for political participation beyond dynastic or entrenched patronage. From inside campaigns, one sees how the method gives political instinct durability. These gains deserve acknowledgement.
However, there are ethical questions that cannot be postponed. In India, the State is not a distant referee but an active presence in electoral competition. Law enforcement, regulatory discretion, surveillance capacity, and administrative power shape campaigns in direct and indirect ways. Ethical norms in political consulting, therefore, serve a dual purpose of protecting democratic competition and providing practitioners with grounds to resist coercive capture by power itself. Ethics here is institutional self-defense, not moral ornamentation.
Across mature democracies, campaign knowledge, especially voter data and strategic insight, is treated as politically sensitive. Parties retain ownership of organizational memory, while consultants operate as custodians bound by confidentiality, cooling-off norms and reputational consequences. These constraints stabilize competition and reduce incentives for both state overreach and private opportunism. Where such norms are weak, mistrust becomes systemic.
Indian campaigns generate intimate political knowledge — booth-level assessments, internal surveys, volunteer networks, leadership vulnerabilities, and fundraising architectures. When this circulates without clear custodianship, democratic confidence erodes. A citizen-centric perspective clarifies why. Voters are not data points in a persuasion pipeline but rights-bearing participants in a constitutional order. Their political preferences and affiliations acquire legitimacy only through consent and transparency. Professional campaigning earns democratic standing when it treats voter data as an extension of civic dignity rather than extractive material.
Recent judicial reaffirmation of the citizen’s right to know who funds political activity has recalibrated expectations of transparency. The next step is to extend that clarity to the professional architecture of campaigns — major consulting engagements, data governance practices and conflicts of interest. Transparency here stabilizes political competition by aligning professional power with public accountability.
A deeper challenge of ideological agnosticism also demands attention. Political consulting often presents itself as value-neutral — transferable across parties and ideological contexts. This carries democratic risk. Politics is not merely technical management. It is a contest over visions of society, justice and power. When persuasion detaches from belief, ideology becomes an optimizable variable rather than a commitment to be defended.
For practitioners, ideological agnosticism creates vulnerability. Without articulated ethical boundaries, mobility is easily mistaken for moral fungibility. Strategic insight migrates between contexts through institutional memory and pattern recognition. This undermines trust between political actors and fuels public suspicion that politics is managed by interchangeable technicians rather than conviction-driven representatives. Addressing this does not need consultants to become ideologues. It requires recognizing that political work is not morally weightless. Conflict of interest norms, cooling-off periods, and data custodianship rules matter, as does the understanding that persuasion operates within a civic relationship rather than a market transaction.
Voluntary norms alone are insufficient, but they are not irrelevant. Professional self-regulation is strongest when it anticipates statutory clarity and assists democratic institutions in distinguishing legitimate political labor from practices that undermine electoral integrity. The legitimacy of political consulting depends not on electoral success alone but on whether it earns public trust as a democratic institution. Democracies mature by placing new forms of power within visible, contestable limits. Political consulting now stands at such a threshold in India. How it governs data, discloses relationships, and acknowledges the moral weight of persuasion will shape the texture of Indian democracy itself.
Shubhrastha is co-author of The Last Battle of Saraighat: The Story of the BJP’s Rise in the North-East and runs a political consulting firm, The Arthashastra Group. The views expressed are personal
