The 2014 election campaign of the BJP was unprecedented not only because, for the first time, a Chief Minister was the prime ministerial candidate of one of the national parties in the fray and tried to promote his state achievements in terms of development across the nation, but also because the party relied on the personality of its leader more than any other party since the Congress under Indira Gandhi. Narendra Modi broke with the BJP's collegial tradition in several ways. He marginalised party veterans, short circuited the BJP apparatus to use a parallel support structure, and resorted to new techniques of communication that saturated the public space. However, these innovations were superimposed on older themes which had sometimes not been used by the BJP itself before, but by others -like caste politics or corruption. Modi's BJP also fell back on some alliances with other parties, the old RSS network, and revisited Hindutva politics to such an extent that 'development' was definitely not the only theme of the Modi campaign. Narendra Modi's campaign during the 2014 Lok Sabha election was unique in many ways. For the first time the main contender for the post of Prime Minister was a Chief Minister who canvassed by publicising his past record in his state. Narendra Modi claimed that he would replicate at the national level what he had achieved in Gujarat in terms of development (vikas), and began his campaign for the prime ministership soon after he won the state election for the third time in December 2012. He was appointed to the BJP Parliamentary Board in March 2013, and became Chairman of the BJP's Central Election Campaign Committee in June, in spite of the opposition of senior party leaders including L.K. Advani. In a way, then, Modi's election campaign started within the BJP as early as 2013, even though there were no primaries. The length of his campaign, which therefore lasted one full year, is rather unique. But the BJP's campaign in 2014 was mostly different because, in contrast with those of Vajpayee and Advani from 1999 onwards, the party minimised its collegial character and that of the NDA, in order to promote one man only. The Modi-centric, populist nature of the campaign was evident from the character of its mass communication and the correlative emancipation of Narendra Modi from the party.At the same time, everything was not that new in Modi's campaign. He focused on tried and tested tactics and themes, including anti-corruption, caste politics, and some Hindu