MEDIA & MATTERS
No displacing the wheel yet
SEVANTI NINAN
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Contrary to fashionable belief in political and popular circles, the Web’s influence on the elections this time is negligible.
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Photo: S. Gopakumar
Reaching out: Brick-and-mortar campaigning still works best.
I have been to Mr. Advani’s blog and decided that I am not his target audience. It has earnest, humourless homilies under a black banner which says in orange, Good Governance, Development, Security. The candidate is pictured with a rather large
laptop, possibly designed to appeal to the laptop generation. He tells you in his opening post, “I observed that based on what we have been witnessing and experiencing in the past two decades, it would have to be acknowledged that the COMPUTER CHIP has displaced the Wheel!” Ergo, Mr. Advani has an IT plan which will tackle every problem India has.
For some unfathomable reason, a lot of people have convinced themselves that this is India’s first Web election. Why? Because just as presidential candidate Obama had decided to use the Web, prime ministerial candidate Advani has decided to use the Internet? Their reasons couldn’t be more dissimilar. Obama was an underdog, using the web to raise money and awareness about his candidacy, using it to build an organisation, in a country which is five times more connected than India is, with less than a third of its population. Mr. Advani is a former Deputy Prime Minister attempting to reinvent himself for a new generation voter. He already has an organisation, it is now attempting to use the Net because it believes it is both cost effective and trendy. There is a difference.
Me too
Because the BJP is using the Web so much, the Congress has begun to. Their ads pop up too, everywhere, though their website looks like an Internet version of Doordarshan. Both parties are using YouTube and Google Adwords. Their politicians are using Facebook. Wow, we are seriously connected, man! Somebody has even worked out that given India’s Internet user base of 40 million, the majority of these probably live in the eight biggest cities and will probably influence some 50 Lok Sabha seats.
There is some defective logic here. Certainly 50 seats is not to be sniffed at, particularly in this election, but why would your vote be influenced by what you encounter on the Web? Why not by what you encounter when you step out of your house or into a public dealing office?
The other theory is that it is a web election because, hello, bloggers have discovered the general elections! They are blogging and tweeting about it. They might even by now have convinced themselves to vote. But as the turnout has demonstrated so far, this newly energised online citizenry hasn’t set voting booths on fire. Not in the first three phases. Are bloggers then setting the agenda for this election? Ask Mayawati, Mulayam Singh or even former cyber citizen Chandrababu Naidu.
And then may be you think it is a Web election because even Google has got into the act, setting up a website with the Hindustan Times to offer all kinds of information. Know your candidate! Find your polling booth! Thanks chum. We always managed to find both before there was Google.
When you come down to brass tacks, the truly mobilising web technology in this election may just prove to be email. Starting with Lok Satta 11 years back when it began its campaign for electoral reform, the country’s growing civil society movement depends heavily on email mobilisation for countrywide reach. There are mailing lists for every kind of development and rights issue from NREGA to the Right to Food.
The Association for Democratic Reforms has a National Election Watch. Made up of some 1200 NGOs, it does solid work on the ground, collecting and analysing affidavits of contesting candidates. For the first four phases of polling this year it analysed 6,735 affidavits to be able to come up with how many have criminal records, how many are charged with really heinous crimes, and which parties have fielded the most candidates with criminal records. The Indian National Congress tops the list followed by the BJP. But if you take just phase four of the elections, it is the Bahujan Samaj Party. It has a list of red alert constituencies which have three or more contesting candidates with criminal records.
More informative
Now, if that sort of information kept coming into your mailbox and you were enough of a concerned citizen to read it, it just might make you think about the way you vote, might it not? Or would you be more influenced by a blogger’s rant?
This particular civil society initiative has also done an asset comparison, looking at the increase in the assets of MPs between 2004 and 2009. And gives you names of the six MPs who have recorded a maximum asset increase, Sachin Pilot among them. S. Bangarappa, on the other hand, has seen the maximum decline in his assets among all candidates. The average individual asset increase of recontesting MPs in this list is 298 per cent. State wise, Karnataka has seen the maximum increase in MPs’ assets between two elections.
There are also other purposeful disseminators via email, who make me think a lot more about what’s happening on the ground at election time than any blog, even Mr. Advani’s. The Lok Sangharsh Morcha, for instance, says that 22,800 tribals of 22 villages have not voted in this election, protesting against the violation of the forest law of 2006 by the Jalgaon district administration. And if I was enough of a bleeding heart to read every single mailing list posting that comes unsolicited into my mailbox, I could give you more examples.
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