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One of my seven social media predictions for India for 2009 was that social media will play an important role in the 2009 Indian general elections.

Young people in India are more engaged with politics than ever in the aftermath of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack and this engagement will carry through to the 2009 elections.

I believe that we will see an unprecedented amount of online debate on the many problems facing India and even specific political parties and candidates. We will also see a serious “get out the vote” campaign to get more young people to go out to vote. We will also see some politicians experiment with social media tools, hoping to replicate the magic of Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign. The Lok Sabha elections for 2009 may even produce India’s first tech Prime Minister.

I think that we saw the first tentative steps in that direction when BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani started a blog yesterday (via Soumyadeep).

The first blog post talks about how he has seen election campaigning change between 1952 and 2009 and explains his reasons for starting a blog –

Welcome, friends, to my blog. My young colleagues who have created this website told me that a political portal without a blog is like a letter without a signature. I quickly accepted this compelling logic.

I am excited by the idea of using the Internet as a platform for political communication and, especially, for election campaign.

The Internet has many attractive attributes, but the best perhaps is that it is owned neither by the government nor by any private media groups. It is open to all and in this sense it is the most democratic of all the communication platforms invented by mankind so far.

I’m sure the posts are ghost-written, but so are most political speeches (even for president elect Obama), so that is to be expected. The tone of the post is conversational. Mr. Advani promises to write more soon (update: and writes another post within two days), and asks the readers to subscribe to his blog. The blog even allows comments, even though the comments are moderated. So far, all the sixteen approved comments are strongly positive.

As a test, I have left the following respectful but mildly critical comment on the post –

Dear Mr. Advani,

Welcome online. I don’t always agree with BJP’s philosophy, but it is great to see you embracing blogs and forums to speak to young people in India. I hope that you will continue to use these tools. I also hope that your campaign team will actively engage with your readers, so that your blog and forum become a platform for meaningful debate instead of a one way communication channel.

Regards,

Gaurav Mishra

Let’s see if my comment is approved. My comment has been approved, so it seems that mildly critical comments are fine, as of now. Let’s see if it changes when a real debate starts in the comments section.

His website, www.lkadvani.in, was launched on November 8, 2008, on his 81st birthday, even though it had been planned since March 2008 ( Mohua Chatterjee in TOI). The website generated very little buzz in the Indian blogosphere but most bloggers welcomed the initiative (see Sampad Swain and Mayank Dhingra).

The website aims to bring alive the persona of Mr. Advani as prime ministerial aspirant, apart from providing information about his election agenda. The website launched with about 150 videos, over 300 photographs and more than 700 pages of textual content (via AlooTechie) and his recent public appearances, speeches, and press releases are regularly updated on the website. The forum section of the website has moderate activity with 1600+ members writing 2500+ posts in 1000+ categories, hardly the numbers that change the course of an election. The website allows users to register to receive email and SMS alerts on Mr. Advani’s events and volunteers desiring to work on the campaign can also submit their applications through the website.

In April 2008, the Press Trust of India had reported that the planned website was part of an overall campaign, run by a special ‘command office’, to revamp Mr. Advani’s image in the run up to the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

The first task for the Advani command office was the creation of the website for his book My Country, My Life in April 2008 (NDTV). The website even had a blog, but it included links to other people’s post about Mr. Advani, instead of posts written by Mr. Advani. One one hand, it shows that Mr. Advani’s campaign team was listening to blog conversations about him. On the other hand, it also shows a lack of familiarity with how blogs actually work.

The command office also intends to use “permission marketing” to reach out to the electorate through calls on mobiles and SMSes.

After the US elections, Sakshi Didwania at the Reuters Blog had wondered if the younger Indian politicians will follow in Obama’s footsteps and embrace the internet. The post noted that even as tech savvy Indian politicians like Rahul Gandhi, Milind Deora, Sachin Pilot and Jyotiraditya Scindia from the Congress and Arun Jaitley from BJP maintain an extensive data base of electorates and voting patterns in states and constituencies, they are missing out on an opportunity to leverage the power of the internet in their electoral campaigns.

In July 2008, Rama Lakshmi at Washington Post reported that Mr. Advani’s online campaign is indeed inspired by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. However, political historian Ramachandra Guha rejected such comparisons between Advani and Obama –

That particular campaign style worked for Obama because he is a young, fresh-faced, charming man who promises change. But Advani has too much baggage, both good and bad, attached to him. It strains one’s credulity to imagine the austere, unsmiling Advani being rebranded like Obama.

Even as Mr. Advani embraces web 2.0, India’s tech-savvy younger politicians still seem to be stuck in the pre-internet era.

Both the BJP and Congress websites are strictly web 1.0. The situation is so bad that even the launch of a basic website by the Delhi unit of the Congress party has prompted TOI’s Ambika Pandit to talk of a “high-tech” political battle between the two political parties.

So far, only Lalu Prasad Yadav (railway minister and former Bihar chief minister) and Omar Abdullah (president of the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference) have experimented with blogging. Mr. Yadav’s blog, however, is hosted in the ‘celebrity blogs’ section of the entertainment website MyPopKorn, so I’m not even sure if I should count it as a serious blog.

The only Indian politician on Twitter is BJP’s V K Malhotra, (@VKMalhotra).

Such skepticism on the importance of the internet in Indian politics has valid reasons, given that less than 5% of Indians have internet access.

However, technology can not only be used to present a prime ministerial candidate to the Indian electorate, it can also be used to showcase him to an International audience.

BJP has a reputation of being a right wing, Hindu nationalistic party, and Mr. Advandi is more right wing than most BJP leaders. While such a reputation can come handy in winning an election, it will quickly become cumbersome when Mr. Advani is sitting in the prime minister’s chair.

I’m sure the thought of rebranding Mr. Advani to the world has crossed the minds of his campaign team (and, if it hasn’t, it should have), even though the content on the website, and the AdWords campaign to promote it (Abhishek Jha), seems to be mostly targeted at an Indian audience.

Still, Mr. Advani’s online campaign is a step in the right direction and will prompt at least a few other prominent politicians to start their own blogs.

I’ll be tracking the role of social media and mobile tools in the 2009 Indian elections in a separate category: Indian Elections 2009. Stay tuned.

Cross-posted at Social Media in Business, Development, and Government.

Related posts:

1. Updated: How Internet and Mobile Technologies are Transforming Election Campaigning in India
2. India’s First Digital Election Wiki
3. My Live Mint Op-Ed on Why BJP’s Digital Election Campaign Wasn’t A #Fail
4. Vote Report India Featured in Indian Daily Deccan Herald’s Story on the Use of Digital Technologies in the Indian Elections
5. My Post Mentioned in America.gov Roundup of Reactions to the 2009 Indian Election Results