Institute For The Future

Technology in Indian elections

Now that elections in India are over, the ballots have been cast and counted, and we know who is the winner, I thought it would be a great exercise to see how technology was used in Indian elections.  As you probably know the ruling Congress party won by a thumping majority even outpacing its own expectations on election results. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is back in power for a second term, and political pundits are unanimous in heaping praise on the role Rahul Gandhi, the scion of Nehru-Gandhi clan, played in this election in connecting with young voters and bringing home the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is the most populous state in the country and has the largest number of parliamentary seats.

Although Indian parties, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tried to use the Internet to reach out to young voters, many of their efforts did not help them connect with young voters.  I am sure it had an effect on some young affluent voters, but it did not resonate with most of them. The leader of BJP and its Prime Ministerial candidate L K Advani started a blog (http://blog.lkadvani.in/).  BJP also has a presence on twitter (http://twitter.com/bjp_). I am not sure whether it is a fake account that is run by a BJP supporter.

The party also extensively used SMS and MMS in urban areas like Delhi to reach out to young, and hip urban voters. They established a presence on Facebook and Orkut also.  Obviously BJP was trying to recreate the Obama magic with the use of web2.0 tools to reach out to voters. But the message fell flat because unlike Obama who with sheer charisma and a new message was able to inspire voters, BJP had a couple of old talking points and a washed out leader who is 82.   Young people find hard to think of him as representing them. He is more famous for his rath yatra to campaign for building a Hindu temple at the disputed Ayodhya site than anything else.

 There is a big thirst in India for younger politicians as many young people believe they are able to understand their viewpoints and their needs, and the older folks are disconnected from the needs of the younger generation. Instead of doing mass SMS bombardment, the BJP would have been more effective if they had personalized messages in some way.

Personally to me what was more interesting were several bottom-up efforts to do outreach to potential voters, monitor fraud etc. A good example is a citizen monitoring platform votereport.  The founders of the describe it as:

“Vote Report India (votereport.in) is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections.

Basically, users contribute direct SMS, email, and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). The platform will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.”

I believe technology will become effective as a campaign and outreach tool when it comes from the masses, and not a top-down initiative.  People should have a stake in the tools, they should be engaged with it for them to succeed. At IFTF we have researched the engagement economy, and we believe that the holy grail is harnessing the power of engagement.  Thousands of people spend hours contributing to Wikipedia or writing reviews for Yelp. What everyone needs to understand is why people are ready to spend hours working for free? Every politician and every organization needs to tap into these driving forces of engagement to have effective online campaign.

The only politician who was able to do this, obviously, was President Obama. He used online platforms to engage with masses in new ways, and his platform became one of the most useful way for Americans to organize for volunteering,  feel a personal connection with the candidate, and spread the message of the campaign.