Tagged: Manmohan Singh RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 3:52 am on May 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Fourth Front, , , , , Manmohan Singh, National Democratic Alliance, , , , , , , Third Front, , United Progressive Alliance,   

    India Votes for No Change: Indian Bloggers & Twitter Users React to #IndiaVotes09 Election Results 

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    Introduction: India Votes for No Change in the 2009 Lok Sabha Elections

    India votes for the incumbent Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)

    Photo courtesy Al Jazeera under a Creative Commons License

    The results for the month long Indian Lok Sabha elections are out and India has voted back the incumbent Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) into power with a decisive verdict, surprising many observers.

    As I write this post, the results for 480 out of all the 543 seats have been declared. The Congress is leading in more than 200 has won 206 seats and UPA is less than 20 11 seats away from reaching the magic figure of 273.

    2009 Indian Lok Sabha Elections IndiaVotes09 Results

    The verdict is a reminder of the Indian electorate’s love affair with the Nehru-Gandhi family and a coming of age of sorts for Rahul Gandhi, the young scion of the family. A jubilant Sonia Gandhi reiterated that Manmohan Singh will be Congress Party’s choice for the prime minister. Manmohan Singh will be the first Prime Minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to return to power after a full five-year term.

    The verdict has also led to some serious soul-searching within BJP. It seems that Lal Krishna Advani’s political career is all but over. It will be interesting to see if BJP moves away from its Hindutva roots and repositions itself as a Right of Center party or becomes even more hardcore Hindu Right under the leadership of someone like Narendra Modi.

    Some of the biggest upsets so far: Ram Vilas Paswan, Ram Naik, Renuka Choudhry, Vinod Khanna, Meera Sanyal and Captain Gopnath lost the election while Shashi Tharoor won by a record margin.

    Summary of Reactions from Indian Bloggers and Twitter Users

    The Congress supporters are jubilant, and the BJP die-hards are understandably glum, but most neutral Indian bloggers and Twitter users are happy with the verdict, for more reason than one.

    The two national parties — Congress and BJP — have increased their tally by 40-50 seats. Both Congress and BJP have a more-or-less similar forward-looking national agenda (apart from BJP’s obsession with Hindutva), unlike the regional parties who are focused on caste, language and state affiliations. The consolidation of the national vote is a sigh of relief for the urban Indian “elite”, who were worried about the increasing fragmentation in Indian politics.

    The UPA is 15-20 seats short of the 273 seats it needs to form the government. This precludes the possibility of the opportunistic horse-trading many observers were expecting in the aftermath of the elections. The (almost) clear verdict for UPA is likely to result in a stable government that lasts for five years and isn’t held hostage by the narrow agendas of the regional coalition partners.

    The decisive Congress victory has also surprised most observers. Most predictions and opinion polls had predicted an indecisive verdict with a close finish between BJP and Congress and a rise in the power of the regional parties.

    Some observers will see the verdict as a validation of the tried-and-tested methods of political campaigning in India. The BJP ran an aggressive 360 degree campaign on mass media and digital media, but it didn’t work, like its 2004 India Shining campaign. The Congress ran a traditional campaign, focused on movie songs, local rallies and the charisma of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and succeeded. I would caution you against reading too much into this coincidence and mistaking it for causality. It’s not BJP’s campaign, but BJP’s Hindutva ideology, that has failed the party. BJP has lost in spite of its brilliant campaign, not because of it.

    #IndiaVotes09: Reactions from Indian Twitter Users

    Twitter conversations related to the Indian elections fell into a few distinct categories, including retweets of news reports on the elections results, exuberance over the Congress win, some soul-searching over BJP’s loss (from a very strong BJP support base on Twitter), and opinions on what the election results mean for India.

    Apart from the themes I have talked about above, the #indiavotes09 hastag on Twitter had its own unique memes.

    The first such meme was predictably self referential. After a handful of tweets on the #indiavotes09 hastag throughout the month long elections, the Indian Twitter community spent the day obsessing about election results, making #indiavotes the number one trending topic on Twitter. This led to the usual recurcive navel gazing about how an India-related hashtag is trending on Twitter and Economic Times even did a story on it.

    @Hiway: Indian Twitter community too big and united to be ignored: #indiavotes09 is trending. (we’ve made many topics ‘trend’ recently)

    (Aside from the Economic Times story: As per ViziSense, which analyses web visitor statistics, there are about 533,000 India-based users of Twitter. Tweeple.in follows 31,000 Twitter users in India.)

    Dina just pointed to an interesting graphic on the irrelevance of trending topics on Twitter, which should dampen the exuberance over #indiavotes09 trending on Twitter.

    The second #indiavotes09 meme was about the failure of BJP’s aggressive digital campaign.

    @MaheshMurthy, the CEO and founder of digital agency Pinstorm, offered some interesting analysis on why the BJP campaign didn’t work –

    @MaheshMurthy: #indiavotes09 Don’t think BJP campaign was brilliant. Strategy to project LKA as a strong leader was clearly wrong.

    @MaheshMurthy: #indiavotes09 I dont think most of us thought we had weak leadership, or even if we did, that it was a big problem.

    @MaheshMurthy: #indiavotes09 BJP would have had a better chance if it focused on the difference they would make that was relevant to us.

    @MaheshMurthy: #indiavotes09 BJP campaign used the right medium: social/digital – but offered no relevant message. They were tuned out.

    @MaheshMurthy: #indiavotes09 Googler to me: Advani using them as he wants to connect with young. For that you need medium AND message.

    Other Twitter users also had interesting comments on BJP’s campaign –

    @Dina: I don’t buy that BJP tactics were brilliant. To add to @maheshmurthy ’s response, there were no conversations. It was classic push advertising.

    @NikhilNarayanan: The Bloggers for BJP has just 120 bloggers as per lkadvani.in (count taken 2 days back). 120 is a very small number.

    @Danishk: The issue with BJP campaign as I see it was they forgot that most people looking at those ads are learned people unlike masses.

    @Amit3D: 30 million people access internet daily in India. Approx 10 mil voted and saw BJP’s digimedia campaign. Don’t think that was enough.

    @Amit3D: So I guess BJPs digimedia campaign was big #FAIL. india is not US in numbers when it comes to internet.

    @Sanjukta: Exactly what I just said. No body likes spamming. All those over the top in your face campaign backfired.

    @mohyt: BJP poll results make me wonder if they’d lost by bigger margin had they not done their huge Social Media Marketing campaign #indiavotes09

    @GasperDesouza: Advani tried an ‘Obama’ in India, online campaign, et al. Now his head is on the BJP chopping block #indiavotes09

    @b50: wishes the BJP well. They fought a hard, aggressive campaign. Best of luck for 2014. Be an Opposition we can be proud of. #IndiaVotes09

    @mudittuli: BJP campaign managers are always disconnected with reality, they tried to do a Obama but got slapped in the face #indiavotes09

    @NairArun: BJP’s online campaign was desperate and tacky. The intent was to replicate Obama’s success, but the execution was poor. #indiavotes09

    @DeadPresident: Advani honours BJP youth campaign team http://bit.ly/gmuWI - congrats folks! @bjp_ and @missionbjp and the people behind those

    I tried to argue on behalf of BJP’s strategist Sudheendra Kulkarni, but I’m clearly in a minority today –

    @Gauravonomics: BJP has lost in spite of its brilliant campaign, not because of it. #indiavotes09

    @Gauravonomics: I agree that the BJP/ LKA strategy backfired. I meant that the campaign was brilliant at a tactical level. #indiavotes09

    @Gauravonomics: The BJP campaign did have grassroots online support. Friends of BJP. Bloggers for Advani. Too many BJP supporters on #indiavotes09

    @Gauravonomics: The fact that it didn’t work (due to message etc.) doesn’t mean that BJP’s (digital) campaign was flawed #indiavotes09

    @Gauravonomics: In fact, I feel a little sad for Sudheendra Kulkarni. Given what he had to work with, he did a really good job. #indiavotes09

    The other big meme on Twitter today was writer and Congress candidate Shashi Tharoor live-tweeting the election results –

    @ShashiTharoor: I have won with a majority greater than any Congress candidate in Tvm in 30 years… Truly humbling. Now the real work begins.

    @navinpai: Wow….just found out @ShashiTharoor tweets!! I wonder if he does it or gets a crack team of writers to pen down 140 characters!!

    @ArunRam: @ShashiTharoor Congrats! Hope the Congress party gives you a key cabinet post. India needs more professionals like you in politics.

    @SheetalDube: I am wondering if the Indian cabinet might witness the highest % increase in literacy level with the inclusion of @ShashiTharoor.

    @manishd: @shashitharoor, I think you would be the first MP to be on twitter. Great way to keep in touch with the electorate. We need more like you.

    @SepiaMutiny: Congratulate Shashi Tharoor directly: @shashitharoor (see his live tweets as the results came in!) #IndiaVotes09 (via @sajahq)

    @viveksingh: Looks like @ShashiTharoor is the most popular politician amongst the twitteratti #indiavotes09

    @GauravKanoongo: How many Indian politicians are here on Twitter? I know about only @shashitharoor #indiavotes09

    @acmhatre: @ShashiTharoor in all honesty, I didn’t think you would win but congratulations. No the real test begins.

    So, the top May 16 memes on #indiavotes09 were: 1. #indiavotes09 trending on Twitter, 2. BJP’s aggressive digital campaign failing, and 3. @ShashiTharoor live-tweeting the election results. What else did I miss?

    #IndiaVotes09: Reactions from Indian Bloggers and Analysts

    The same themes have also been dominant in the Indian blogosphere and mainstream media reactions to the election results.

    Rajiv Dingra at WATBlog and Ashish Sinha at Pluggd.in wonder if BJP’s “flawed” campaign strategy was responsible for its defeat. Bhatnaturally argues that BJP’s campaign was too negative. Nirupama Hegde at The Hindu thinks that civic engagement amongst the youth needs to go beyond voting. Ananth Krishnan at The Hindu believes that the internet has failed to get the vote out, but will still be useful to build an online public sphere for political discourse. Business Standard has a great analysis of the election campaigns of various political parties.

    Veteran film director and independent candidate Prakash Jha reflects on his loss in Champaran.

    Industrialist and independent member of parliament Rajeev Chandrashekhar compares his election predictions with the results and finds that, like most other pundits, he was way off the mark. The Overlord points out that both the Indian online community and the poll pundits were wrong in their election predictions.

    BJP supporter Yossarin Offstumped says that the Indian electorate has voted for stability but chosen the wrong national party. Atanu Dey believes that the election results are a setback for India’s development. BJP supporter Brajesh Mishra says that, instead of grieving, BJP should introspect and start preparing for the next elections. Friends of BJP co-founder Rajesh Jain says that BJP needs to decide if it wants to be Right of Center or the Hindu Right. Sush Jaitley analyzes what went wrong with BJP and says that BJP needs to apologize to the country. Jai Mrug at DNA says that BJP is back where it was a decade ago. B Raman at Rediff does a good roundup of the post-election conversations on pro-BJP websites.

    Mehul Srivastava at BusinessWeek does an analysis on what the results mean for Indian politics.  Zoya Hasan at DNA says that the verdict is a reaffirmation of the Indian electorate’s faith in the Nehru-Gandhi family. Sidharth Bhatia at DNA believes that the vote for Congress is a vote for an inclusive India. An Indian Muslim says that the results are a verdict against divisive politics. Harini Calamur believes that the vote for Congress is a verdict against negativity. Dina Mehta thinks that the Mumbai terrorist attack did not affect the elections because people do not want more fear and hatred and negativity being imposed on us by our politicians. In another post, Dina argues that Indian voters have voted for good governance and progress rather than good politicians. S. Mitra Kalita at WSJ calls the verdict a victory for the global Indian. Vir Sanghvi at HT says that Rahul Gandhi has emerged as the most astute strategist of all. Rajesh Jain at WSJ also writes an open letter to the new UPA government.

    The BBC India team did a great live coverage of the election results, so did the NDTV team, Indipepal, Sundeep Dougal at Outlook and a group of Indian political bloggers, including Offstumped.

    I’ll be updating this post with reactions to the Lok Sabha results from Indian bloggers and Twitter users. Please leave tips to interesting posts and your own reactions in the comments section.

    Cross-posted at Global Voices.

     

    • Dina Mehta 3:56 am on May 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      heh – check this out Gaurav – @ross just tweeted the link – http://www.flickr.com/photos/meg/3533025291/ – with the comment – “Twitter trending topics and the hump of irrelevance”

    • Dina Mehta 3:56 am on May 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Gaurav … one more quick thought – the title of your post seems to suggest that the country voted for no change (I know you meant it in a different way – UPA back). I do feel the voter has voted actively for change actually – for many of the reasons you have mentioned in your post, one of the largest being wanting a stable strong govt rather than an adhoc mix of parties and a fragmented house.

      Just sharing :)

      • Gaurav Mishra 4:47 am on May 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        @Dina: Yes, I meant “no change” as in status quo, but you are right in that the status quo itself is of a different nature.

    • Sameer 3:56 am on May 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I agree with Dina. Your post is great but the title is a little misleading.

    • Maneesh 4:40 am on May 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Excellent round up Gaurav..

      I completely agree with you on the BJP and it’s digital marketing view that you shared here. The idea was right, but the improper execution and the lack of a strong message and a bent of mind that using the web itself would bring youth to one’s fold was the premise of it not pushing BJP up the poll ladder. In fact many had considered their campaign an effect of Obama using the web,a nd dubbed it the Obama way of marketing which I strongly disagree with.. and even blogged about at WATBlog (Linked that post to my name here).

      Congress has to thank BJP’s confusion and obsession with Hindutva, the Left’s clear lack of foresight, and to a very small extent Raj Thakeray’s MNS for its victory that went a long way beyond Singh’s credo and Rahul and Sonia’s charm. For that reason I also believe the result shouldn’t be dubbed as the continuing love affair of our countrymen and the Gandhi family.

      Shashi Tharoor being on Twitter doesn’t quite cut for me because he just follows his son and the Mutiny mag guy (at least till the last time I saw).

      Once again, a very good post..

      • Gaurav Mishra 4:50 am on May 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        @Manish: I just wrote a longish piece on the BJP campaign. Will post it soon.

        I do believe that the Gandhi family has consolidated its hold on Indian politics in these elections.

        Yes, Shashi Tharoor only follows two people on Twitter, but he does answer some @reply messages.

    • R R Dasgupta 11:49 am on May 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I don’t quite agree with Zoya Hassan’s observation on people’s Love for Nehru-Gandhi lineage. It was a collective voice of people for stability as against a mixed bag of on-and-off alliances, total revolt & apathy on being repeatedly divided on communal lines,rewarding the good work on NPT, for demonstrating resilience against extreme provocation from our old friends Pakistan and ofcourse the resurgent face of a Young India with Rahul, Sachin, Jyotiraditya and Milind.

      • Gaurav Mishra 11:43 am on May 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        In retrospect, we can attribute all sorts of reasons to the results, but any of these factors could have gone wither way. I believe that the appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi family amongst India’s masses is perhaps the biggest reason for the Congress victory. It’s also useful to remember that Rahul, Sachin, Jyotiraditya and Milind are all in politics not because of their own achievements, but because of their families.

    • revathi 10:16 am on May 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      BJP should find a fair, young preferably male with dimples for the next election. Then perhaps the contest will be more equal.

  • Gaurav Mishra 10:42 pm on March 22, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Advani@Campus, , , , BJP IT Vision, , , CPI(M), , , , , Gandhi, , India Shining, , , Manmohan Singh, Milind Deora, , Narendra Modi, , Priya Dutt, , , Shivraj Singh Chouhan, SM Krishna, , Sonia, , V K Malhotra,   

    Updated: How Internet and Mobile Technologies are Transforming Election Campaigning in India 

    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).

    Bloggers for Advani

    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).

    Advani youtube channel

    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.

    bjp_twitter_profile

    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.

    vote_for_congress

    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).

    vote_for_cpim

    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.

     

    • vivek khandelwal 12:05 am on March 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      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 | Reply

      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 | Reply

      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 | Reply

      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

    • Abhishek 9:00 am on March 31, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      This is one of the best post I have read in recent times and definitely the best for politics so far. Kudos to Gaurav for that. I am involved in one of political campaigns itself so this post definitely gives me better idea on how to go about it. I know one another twitter account which is of Gujarat Congress @gujcongress.

      Another interesting stuff I read today was about google keywords campaign by BJP. If you search for the keyword “Sonia Gandhi” or “Rahul Gandhi” in google you will get L K Advani’s site in a sponsored result :) . It made me laugh out loud.

      By the way keep up the good work Gaurav.

    • salma 11:57 pm on August 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      wat were the reasons for the failer of advani’s online canpaign when compared to congress, when his campaign was much better?

    • salma 12:00 am on August 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      wat were the reasons for the failer of advani’s online canpaign,wat was the result of it after the elections? when compared to congress, his campaign was much better?

    • best_internet_phone 11:01 am on November 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I have not much time, but I've got many useful things here, love it!

    • staffing 8:51 pm on December 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      This blog is useful.
      For more jobs visit http://www.staffingpower.com

  • Gaurav Mishra 10:15 pm on March 22, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Manmohan Singh, ,   

    Global Voices Special Coverage on the 2009 Indian General Elections 

    Indian Election 2009
    Image by Flickr user Carol Mitchell, used under a Creative Commons license

    The world’s largest democracy, India, goes to election starting April 16, 2009. The month long general elections to the 15th Lok Sabha will be held in five phases on April 16, April 22, April 23, April 30, May 7 and May 13, and the results will be announced on May 16.

    This is an important election for India, in the context of a series of terrorist attacks last year that shook up the country, and a worldwide financial crisis that threatens to derail its strong economic growth. However, even as analysts debate about the big issues that will shape the upcoming elections, they will do well to remember that India’s 714 million voters elect their 543 representatives based on small local and regional issues, instead of the big national issues.

    This local nature of India’s national elections is at the core of India’s coalition politics. In the last decade, both Indian National Congress (Congress) and Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) have had to form coalitions consisting of several small regional parties. The BJP led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was in power from 1999 to 2004 under BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has been in power since 2004 under Congress party’s Manmohan Singh. Parties opposed to both the Congress and the BJP are also talking about forming a Third Front, but previous experience has shown that such coalitions tend to be fragile.

    Both the alliances have announced their prime ministerial candidates. On December 11, 2007 the NDA announced that BJP party leader Lal Krishna Advani will be their candidate (BBC). It has built its campaign around L K Advani, with the slogan Kushal Neta, Nirnayak Sarkaar (able leader, decisive government) (IBNLive). On February 6, 2009, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi wrote in the Congress party magazine Sandesh that Manmohan Singh will be UPA’s candidate (IBNLive). Congress is using the Oscar winning soundtrack Jai Ho (let there be victory) from the movie Slumdog Millionaire as its official campaign tune (Financial Times), but its campaign seems to be more focused on Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi, than the official candidate Manmohan Singh. This, however, is in line with the Congress party’s long history of dependence on the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

    The election has already witnessed a controversial tussle between the outgoing Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) N. Gopalaswami and the incoming CEC Navin Chawla (Indian Express) and legal battles over alleged hate speech by BJP candidate Varun Gandhi (IBNLive). During the election period, we are sure to see the usual controversies that surround general elections in India: the use of government resources for campaigning, incidences of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric in campaign speeches, changes in the coalition alliances before, during and after the elections, and allegations of booth capturing and other irregularities during the elections.

    In this special coverage on the 2009 Indian elections, the Global Voices team will capture the Indian blogosphere’s reactions to the campaigns and the controversies, and also highlight interesting digital initiatives to build a vibrant networked public sphere in India, get out the vote and build transparency into the election process. Stay tuned.

     

    • Deepika 1:52 am on March 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I and my family have always been congress supporters but slowly are realising that in the national interest we hv to look for other options.Because even after 50 yrs of congress rule if a movie on slums can get oscars it is only due to congress.
      And about the leader,i just dont have even slightest of doubt that Mr.manmohan Singh has failed and failed miserably.And its not exactly Manmohan who has failed but the madam behind him.If Manmohan was doing wt madam was telling him to,then it means that madam has failed in ruling,so she’s a looser and thus will loose this election too.I hope in the tension of loosing she doesnt commit the all famous “Margaik” mistake which congress always commits.
      We can clearly see the party slowly going towards the confusing state of “Margaik”.You can see the fear clearly,everybody knows margaik will happen.

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