February 29, 2024

By Anand Kurian*

Imagine that you are sitting in the portico of your very select club; you have just been admitted as a member there. Around you, you hear the hum of conversation and laughter as the rich and famous in your city unwind over cocktails and snacks. You try to appear relaxed and feel very good about your status in life.

Somewhere at the back of your mind—deep in the recesses of it, where you don’t have to confront it—is the small thought that you enjoy it all the more, because club membership is not available to everyone, that you have been included and many others have been excluded.

In the case of your club, we see that the majority of people are excluded and only a small minority is included; this is what the advertising strategy of positional products is all about.

What we see currently playing out in politics across the world could be referred to as the Inclusion-Exclusion Game. However, unlike the appeal of exclusivity in an advertisement for positional products, a politician must attract a majority of voters to win a democratic election.

Political parties and political leaders have various means of winning an election – by ensuring a good economy, equal rights for all, peace at home and abroad. Iin short, by good governance. Or instead, they could choose to follow the path that we see increasingly being used in several countries – they could employ the Inclusion- Exclusion Game.

Here is Subramaniam Swamy, a Harvard University Ph.D. in Economics and a former Harvard faculty member, a six-time former member of India’s Parliament and a leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In 2017, talking about the relevance of good governance tor elections he told HuffPost, “Governance is a necessary condition for achieving electoral victory, not a sufficient condition. For sufficient, you needed some sentimental issues. For us, for the BJP, the sentimental issue was Hindutva. And unless we articulate that, we will not be able to win. Economic development is a must, but you can win the polls (even) if the economy is flattened.”

Swamy may be right inasmuch as the BJP has employed the Inclusion-Exclusion Game rather adroitly to win the past two national elections, using their call for a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation), a concept that excludes non-Hindus.

As analysts point out, Donald Trump used the same game with skill to win the United States Presidential election in 2016. While Trump’s main slogan was to make America great again, was the underlying subliminal message make it white again?

Writes Steve Phillips in the New York Times, “From the day he opened his presidential campaign in 2015 by demonizing Mexicans to the enthusiasm generated by the calls for building a wall along the Mexican border to aggressively ramping up deportations of immigrants of color to eliminating DACA to vulgarly denigrating African nations and Haiti, this administration has been quite clear about its preference for white people.”

You see a similar pattern of the Inclusion-Exclusion Political Game being played by politicians in several other countries. In Malaysia, for instance, it was institutionalized several years ago. The Malaysian government has conceived and developed policies to favor the ‘bumiputras’ (‘sons of the soil’) which The Economist denounced as “racially discriminatory”.  The groups included are the Malays and other indigenous peoples, those that are excluded are the Chinese and Indian Malaysian communities. A similar pattern is visible in Indonesia – with the Chinese minority being the one to be excluded.

 Of course, the voters backing the divisive leaders could enjoy policies for subsidies and job and college admission reservations, as in Malaysia. But even without tangible benefits, the game would still achieve its objective. More than specific gains, it is the sense of inclusion (‘We are part of the group’) and the pleasure that comes from exclusion (‘They are not part of the group’) that makes it work. Remember that the gratification that accrues from being a member of an exclusive club does not emanate from the club infrastructure and facilities that it offers.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt wondered if the events under Nazi Germany of the time could be explained by a “tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion, without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions”.

That certainly could be part of the answer but, perhaps, not the whole of it. The call of the Inclusion-Exclusion Political leaders, when it is made, seems almost impossible to resist to those who seek such leaders. The call seems to become more irresistible when it is rationalised in religious terms. The religious underpinning of the campaign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India is rather obvious. In the case of Donald Trump, it was less obvious but the dog whistle was heard and understood by his target audience.

The game is also made irresistible at times when it is justified based on fake history, and on the basis of past wrongs (which could be real or manufactured). Adolf Hitler was adept at using “historical wrongs” very adroitly to his advantage. His goal, he declared, was to bring about a New Order, to replace the post-World War I international order, dominated by Britain and France that he claimed was unjust.

Subramanium Swamy told the HuffPost in 2017, “We Hindus are being put upon, we are 80 percent, but we are treated like the 10 percent… We are the ones who fought the Mughals, we are the ones who fought the British, but Hindus are the ones who have not been able to rule.”

Sometimes, it may seem anomalous that we are seeing the game at play in these times of globalisation. Technologies are erasing borders as never before. Large populations are traveling on work and for leisure. It may be better understood if we realise that, perhaps, the backlash occurs, not in spite of globalisation but because of it. At one level, while it may seem we welcome it, perhaps, at another level (not often expressed), we resent and fear globalization.

The humorist Joel Stein was motivated enough to write in Time of the changes he saw in his own hometown in New Jersey. He wrote, “I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J.” He subsequently apologised, saying, ‘I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it.”

Politicians who play the Inclusion-Exclusion Game today use the changes in local culture that are caused by globalisation and the unease that some voters may feel to provoke thoughts that their community and their culture are under threat. Given that the game is proving to be an effective marketing tool in politics, it is very likely that we will see even more of it in the future, than we have in the past.

*Anand Kurian, a global marketing practitioner and theorist, has worked with nearly every major multi-national consumer company. His twin concepts, Conflict as a Marketing Tool and the Inclusion-Exclusion Game, were fictionalized in ‘The Peddler of Soaps’, a book that anticipated the rise of religious fundamentalism and its aftermath.

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