Updated: How Internet and Mobile Technologies are Transforming Election Campaigning in India
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I’m starting off the Global Voices special coverage on the 2009 Indian general elections by analyzing how internet and mobile technologies are transforming election campaigning in India.
Politics in India is essentially local and India’s voters elect their representatives based on small local and regional issues, instead of the big national issues. As a result, election rallies and door-to-door canvassing, supplemented by local hoardings and print ads in the vernacular languages have traditionally been at the core of election campaigning in India.
In 2004, the incumbent BJP broke away from this pattern with its aggressive nation-wide ‘India Shining’ campaign. It recruited advertising and PR agencies to manage its campaign, focused on the urban first time voter, advertised heavily on print and television, and allocated 5% of its campaign budget to an e-campaign, for revamping its campaign website, pushing out text messages, pre-recorded voice clips and emails to its database of 20 million email users and 20 million phone users, and offering campaign-related mobile ringtones for download (BBC/ BBC/ Rediff/ Hindu). The ‘India Shining’ campaign didn’t work eventually, and Sonia Gandhi led Congress to a surprise victory, once again reaffirming the almost magical appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi family amongst India’s voters. Many observers even attributed BJP’s loss to its “elitist” ‘India Shining’ campaign (Live Mint).
In spite of its “failure”, BJP’s India Shining campaign has set the pattern for all Indian election campaigns since then: spend 40-50% on print, 20% on outdoors, 15% on TV, 5%-10% on internet and mobile and the rest on radio, film theaters and on-ground activities (Live Mint).
What, then, has changed since 2004? For one, the demographic profile of India’s electoral based has shifted. More than half of India’s 1150 million population is younger than 25, 42 million new voters have entered the electorate since 2004, and, as a result of the newly delimited constituencies, the importance of urban votes has increased in the electoral collage. Not only that, the internet and mobile penetration in India has increased dramatically since 2004, from 26 million to 365 million for mobile, and from 16 million to 80 million for the internet. Even more importantly, shaken by the 11/26 Mumbai terrorist attack, and inspired by Barack Obama’s success in the US elections, the young urban Indian is likely to step out to vote for the first time in India’s recent electoral history. As a result, both BJP and Congress are targeting young, urban voters like never before. BJP and Congress, however, have adopted different tactic to appeal to this audience. While Congress is banking on the youthful appeal of Rahul Gandhi, the 39 year of scion of the Gandhi family, BJP has embarked on an aggressive 360 degree campaign, inspired by the Obama campaign (Chicago Tribune/ AFP/ Indian Express/ TOI/ Reuters/ Economic Times/ The Hindu).
While BJP’s official website is nothing but a brochure, Lal Krishna Advani’s website has several interesting features. To begin with, LK Advani’s blog has been active since January 2009 and each of the ten odd posts have between 50 to 150 comments. Surprisingly, the Hindi version of LK Advani’s blog has very few comments. The forum on LK Advani’s website isn’t much to look at, but it’s doing well, with 6586 members, 2940 topics, and 9354 posts.
The Advani@Campus initiative seeks to build a grassroots volunteer campaign “to contact and mobilize young voters in thousands of college campuses across the country” (Telegraph/ DNA/ NDTV/ Indian Express). The focus on recruiting volunteers is reflected in a well-structured volunteer program. The tasks range from recruiting first time voters, promoting LK Advani’s website and social media profiles, translating sections of the website, designing banner ads, and helping out with other campaign work. According to one report, BJP has recruited more than 7000 volunteers through the website (Business Standard).
Especially interesting is the Bloggers for Advani initiative run by Mallika Noorani. The initiative is coordinated through a Google Group (started based on a suggestion by yours truly), and encourages bloggers to display a Bloggers for Advani button and promote BJP’s ideas on their blogs (Hindustan Times/ NDTV).
It seems that most of I have confirmed from the BJP campaign team that all the social media initiatives on the Advani campaign are run by volunteers and encouraged by the campaign coordinators. In any case, it’s difficult to identify which profiles or groups are official and which are unofficial. The official website links to a LK Advani Facebook page (with 390 supporters) and an Advani for PM Orkut group (with 960 members), but there are several other unofficial groups with similar memberships. The BJP Supporters Group on Orkut with 22,157 members and the @BJP_ Twitter profile with 416 followers claim to be official, but are probably run by volunteers.
A group which seems to work closely with the campaign team is the Friends of BJP group (Facebook/ Orkut), which includes several prominent professionals including Rajesh Jain and R K Mishra (DNA). Another unofficial website which is getting some traction is Join BJP.
Apart from these national level initiatives, several BJP leaders, including Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi (DNA), Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and V K Malhotra also have well-designed websites. Narendra Modi and V K Malhotra also have Twitter profiles.
The BJP is also running an aggressive online ad campaign, primarily with Google, with search ads across as many as 200,000 keywords (including keywords related to Congress leaders), placement ads across 50,000 websites, and banner ads across 2,000 websites. With a billion searches every month, BJP’s campaign is expected to recah 75% of India’s internet users (Live Mint/ Economics Times/ TOI/ ContentSutra).
BJP is also planning to send one billion SMSes to about 250 million cellphone users, who are not enrolled in the Do-Not-Call registry. Overall, telecom operators expect to make an additional revenue of $10 million from an extra traffic of 3-4 billion SMSes sent by all the political parties, apart from money from multimedia messages, songs and wallpapers (Economic Times/ Indian Express/ Financial Express).
BJP is also planning to use technology on the backend during the elections. For instance, it plans to use a Geographical Information System (GIS) based application to track progress in all polling booths as it gets booth-wise results from its volunteers (Telegraph).
Last week, the BJP also released a detailed 30-page IT Vision document (PDF) with much fanfare. The document is partly a road map to reform and partly a pre-election populist pipe dream. It promises to give the highest priority to developing IT infrastructure and leveraging it for better governance and inclusive development. Specifically, it promises to match China on all IT-related parameters within 5 years. While many observers have dismissed the document as pre-election populism, others have pointed out that it is a testament to BJP’s forward looking thinking that it believes that it can win an election by promising to transform India into an IT super-power. On the other extreme, Binu Karunakaran is worried about the growing reach of techno-Hindutva.
The Indian National Congress, on the other hand, seems to be stuck in the web 1.0 era. Both the official Congress website and the Congress Media websites are online brochures. The Vote for Congress portal, which was supposed to revolutionize its online campaign by providing the Congress candidates a platform to blog (Hindu/ TOI), is still not up. None of the senior Congress leaders — Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and Manmohan Singh — have a website and, what’s worse, their URLs are owned by cyber-squatters (Indian Express). The party does want to set up 600 internet kiosks across the country (Hindu) but without engaging interactive content, their effectiveness might be limited.
Shashi Tharoor — author and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations — is perhaps the only Congress candidate to seriously leverage the web in his campaign, with presence on Facebook and Orkut (CIOL/ Sify). Former Karnataka chief minister SM Krishna has a Twitter profile. Some of the younger Congress candidates like Priya Dutt, Milind Deora (Facebook) and Sachin Pilot also have well-designed websites, but aren’t really active on social media (Hindu). Some regional Congress leaders, like Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, also have a respectable presence on the web (Hindu/ Exchange4Media/ Indian Express).
Several other regional parties have either set up, or revamped, their websites, in the run up to the general elections. The CPI-M (Live Mint/ Hindu/ Economic Times/ Indian Express/ Business Standard) and Samajvadi Party websites seem to be the most well-designed. However, none of these websites are using social media tools, beyond asking for donations and newsletter subscriptions.
Even as politicians are trying to use new media tools effectively, agencies specializing in digital political campaigns have sprung up in response to the opportunity, and are even offering money back guarantees .
The use of internet and mobile technologies for political campaigning has also posed new questions in front of the election commission, related to tracking expenditure on new media and implementing rules that ban campaigning 48 hours before the poll (LiveMint).
Many observers have pointed out that the digital campaigns by BJP and other Indian political parties are amateurish in comparison to Barack Obama’s social media campaign and they are right. BJP’s digital campaign can hardly be compared to Obama’a campaign in terms of ambition, execution or results (CIOL/ Networked World).
Even within the Indian context, the Facebook groups of all the politicians, taken together, have fewer members than the facebook group for the recent Pink Chaddi Campaign (Economic Times).
The campaign is hardly going to change the course of the election; the election will still be decided in India’s small towns and villages. But, even if it “fails”, the campaign will set a precedent for all future elections in India, just like the ‘India Shining’ campaign did, five years ago.
Cross-posted on Global Voices, my fellowship blog and my class blog.
staffing, 
salma and 6 others are discussing. 
. It made me laugh out loud. 
vivek khandelwal 12:05 am on March 23, 2009 Permalink |
Hey…
I am not really sure about the impact sending 1 billion smses would make, but for sure the early adopters are not really happy seeing LK aAdvani all over the place but then talking about figures , yes the BJP does have a advantage as compared to Congress.
The LK Advani ads have been repulsive off late but i guess the TIER 2 Cities is what they are targeted to and this spamming would create a impact there.
However the IT Vision document that BJP has come up with , is simply far too fetched. The kinda of history the country has and the priorties we are looking at , the document is nothing but a another political gimmick.
infact this document triggered of a article in Mint titled BJP’s outlandish vision.
Sanjay Nirupam is another politician who is very active on facebook and also maintains a blog
http://sanjaynirupam.blogspot.com/
Its interesting to see political parties using the internet but then the fact that the blog comments are highly moderated and not screened and the PR Agencies maintaining their profiles screws up the entire motive.
This election would see some wannabe Obama’s,however spamming and not interacting
Aryan Niyukti 12:24 am on March 23, 2009 Permalink |
Use of Internet & Mobile in Election Campaign is surely a welcome change because unlike other mediums these are two way mediums. If nothing else, it will lead to opening up of an easily accessible means of communication with our elected representatives.
Aryan
Bihar Jobs
Prasad 3:01 am on March 27, 2009 Permalink |
I would say Pradyut Bora has done a real good job by taking BJP’s election campaign to the next level. Also the other political parties have woke up to the challenge and are doing their bit to use the digital media to the best of their ability. However, I think all these political parties need to be more professional and strategic with their campaigns.. you wouldn’t like to wake up to an SMS from Chadra Babu Naidu at 3.00 in the morning asking you to vote for him ( yes , it happened with me ) or it is not so pleasing to see a veteran leader like Advani gazing out of his banner onto some half naked female actress. There has already been a lot of blogs speaking about these and today I found this guy who not just analysed the drawbacks of the BJP campaign but also added screenshots
http://seo-kolkata.blogspot.com/2009/03/internet-in-indian-political-campaigns.html – (for those few who haven’t yet seen the Advani ad in some crappy site )
Anaggh A. Desai 3:52 pm on March 27, 2009 Permalink |
I do not really think they have understood the use at all. It has been more than 5 years & at least the mobile world plan should have been in place. The idea of Consistency & Constancy is not understood by the Political Parties at all.
Frankly speaking, it is just an addition, plugged in by Advisors, Advt. Agencies who need to plug in the so called Social Media angle.
And it is ridiculous to see our Politicos most of them 70+ talk about internet, mobile or simply technology:) Pathetic to say the least.
Twitter has an abundance of them, so has FB followers with none of them knowing what the other is doing in the same party!
However the positive – Gives some employment in this recession; some nepotism also helps. Advt agencies can learn with their money instead of understanding it themselves.
AND on a lighter note – allows you to act as a critic, thereby other parties hopefully to read & learn (if they know how). Also allowing me to Rant about all of this.
Have a good one! Cheers