Introduction: The Pink Chaddi Campaign as a case study of online citizen activism in India.
Last week, I wrote a longish roundup of the discussions in Indian mainstream and participatory media around the controversial Pink Chaddi Campaign.
Briefly, journalist Nisha Susan set up The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook and urged women to gift pink panties to Pramod Mutalik, the head of the ultra-conservative Hindu group Shri Ram Sena, in order to shame him into backing down from his threats to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations.
The campaign has become one of the best Indian examples of how a grassroots community can come together, collaborate and take collective action using social media tools.
I have written before that managing collaboration in an online community is a cloud problem (irregular and unpredictable) rather than a clock problem.
We know the boundary conditions which are necessary for a vibrant community, but we also know that these conditions are not sufficient. So, most social media “initiatives” are trial and error affairs. Most websites fail to become vibrant communities. Most communities fail to collaborate towards a shared objective. Most collaboration fails to produce collective action. Most collective action fails to achieve the desired results.
So, instead of a how-to checklist, we have case studies of one-off success stories. But these one-off success stories are important because they help us get a sense of the boundary conditions which are necessary for effective collaboration and collective action in online communities.
In this post, I’ll outline three lessons that activists and marketers can learn from the Pink Chaddi Campaign.
Lesson 1: Build your campaign around the zeitgeist, or the social, cultural and political ethos of your identified target group. Then, give it a humorous or irreverent tweak to help it stick.
The Pink Chaddi Campaign tapped into the nationwide outrage against Shri Ram Sena after its activists beat up a group of young women in a Mangalore pub, claiming that the women were violating traditional Indian values by wearing Western clothes and drinking alcohol with men (Wikipedia).
It’s important to note, however, that this outrage was mostly limited to a small but increasingly vocal section of Indian society: young men and women in urban India, who are isolated from the harsh realities of the rest of India by a lucky combination of family background, education, and work.
We come from liberal families (or have broken away from family ties), speak English as our first language, often work in the new economy sectors of media, entertainment and technology, and spend our free time socializing with friends and strangers on online communities and in neighborhood shopping malls. We believe in personal freedom and even libertarianism but don’t really consider ourselves particularly Westernized (because all our friends are like us).
We know that our parents, or at least some of our friends’ parents, don’t really understand the appeal of hanging out in cafes and pubs. We also know that they actively dislike the idea of dating, premarital sex and love marriages, especially if it involves their daughter.
We know that even the most liberal Indian politicians are closet conservatives, and many Indian politicians are illiterate goons. Sometimes, we read stories of women being raped, burned or killed in villages because they had an affair with someone from another caste and feel ashamed of our country.
But we close our eyes and tell ourselves that the shining emergent India we know is not the same as the dark shameful India of illiterates, bigots and goons. Then, Mumbai happens, or Mangalore happens, and the world as we know it, with its clearcut boundaries between us and them, collapses around us.
With its unconventional choice of name, The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook self-consciously appealed to this strong sense of us versus them. It reached out to the small minority of men and women in India who are amused by the irony of a woman being called ‘Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward’ in the same sentence. It also self-consciously distanced itself from the Indian mainstream which still wants its Bollywood heroines to be virginal and associates ‘Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women’ with the Bollywood vamps of yesteryears.
The choice of sending pink panties to Shri Ram Sena further reinforced this self-consciously ironical positioning. Chaddi means ‘underwear’ in several Indian languages, but combined with the choice of colour — pink — it essentially means pink panties.
When asked why she had chosen the pink panty as the focal point of her protest, Nisha Susan couldn’t come up with a clear answer. Sometimes, she said that it was a reference to the khaki-shorts-wearing RSS cadres who are often derisively called “chaddi wallahs” (underwear wearers). Sometimes, she said that she chose pink because it is a frivolous colour. Sometimes, she chose to highlight the feminism of pink against the machismo of saffron, the Sangh Parivar’s colour of choice. She also mentioned that the gift of pink panties was a gift of love, in the Valentine’s Day tradition, meant to shame Shri Ram Sena into backing down from its threats to disrupt Valentine’s day celebrations. Some participants in the campaign even suggested that the act of sending pink panties was an assertion that Indian women are ready to put aside their sense of shame and fight for their rights.
I think all these interpretations are correct, but, at the core of the campaign was the idea of inverting the sense of shame. The Shri Ram Sena wanted to shame Indian women into submission. The gift of pink panties didn’t only serve as an ironical act of defiance (“we won’t be shamed”) but also struck at their own sense of maleness (“you should be ashamed”). That’s why gifting pink panties was a better symbol than gifting bangles, which symbolizes “you should be ashamed”, but not “we won’t be shamed”.
Consciously or unconsciously, Nisha Susan had designed the perfect viral campaign. The pink chaddi campaign was not only relevant for its target audience, it was also funny and irreverent. An ironical inside joke is often the perfect viral hook, just ask the hipsters.
Lesson 2: Build virality into your campaign. Choose a compelling message that users want to share. Then, use a platform that makes it easy for them to share the message.
In the last section, I have explained why gifting pink panties on the Valentine’s Day was the perfect symbol for the protest against Shri Ram Sena. But a great viral idea,in itself, isn’t enough. It also needs to be packaged into a compelling and easy to share message. That’s where the brilliantly designed Pink Chaddi Campaign Poster comes in.
Nisha had first designed the poster herself by photoshopping an image of an RSS chaddiwala –
However, she realized that she didn’t want to specifically target the RSS and asked her designer friend to redesign the poster. The rest, as they say, is history.
I would argue that it was the poster that helped the Pink Chaddi campaign go viral, in India and internationally. It was simple both in its design and its symbolism. Take a retro Hindu calendar with an Om, replace the Om with a pink panty, add some retro fonts and you have the perfect poster that triggers Bollywood, Hindutva, and irrevenece at the same time. (Nisha clarifies that the poster was inspired by a retro ice cream poster.) More than three-fourths of the posts that linked to the Pink Chaddi Campaign blog also displayed the poster.
The choice of Facebook, instead of Orkut, as the social networking platform was also symbolic of the self-conscious us versus them positioning. Almost two third of active internet users in India use Orkut, whereas Facebook is primarily used by a more metro-centered elite crowd, who are often introduced to it by friends in US universities. For highest reach, the campaign should have been present on both Orkut and Facebook (like its rival The Pink Condom Campaign), but it strengthened its us versus them positioning by exclusively focusing on Facebook.
Facebook is also the perfect viral platform, with its hyperactive news feed. Every time an user joined The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook, an announcement showed up in the news feeds of all their friends. Members could also actively invite their friends to join the group, and given that I got half a dozen invites myself, many members did use the invite feature.
The campaign also asked group members to share pictures of themselves with the pink panties they were gifting, and many did, both on the Facebook group and on their own blogs. This was an explicit viral element that also helped the campaign gain traction.
Assuming that the average group member has 200 friends (a conservative number), up to 10 million facebook users were exposed to the campaign. Even if we factor in a high degree of duplication in the friend lists of members, it will be safe to say that millions of Facebook users saw the campaign in their news feeds.
Lesson 3: Design your campaign to translate online engagement into offline action. Use modularity and granularity to make it easy to take collective action by breaking it down into smaller individual actions that can be taken independently.
The Pink Chaddi campaign was also designed to trigger offline action, gifting pink panties to Shri Ram Sena on Valentine’s Day. Finally, almost 2000 panties were sent to Shri Ram Sena, against a target of 5000.
I think that the campaign was able to drive offline action, because it made the action both modular and granular. It broke down the task of sending 5000 pink panties to Shri Ram Sena into smaller individual tasks and it made the individual tasks really small: send one panty to the Sena.
The address of Sena’s Hubli office was shared prominently on all campaign messaging and supporters were encouraged to directly mail panties to the address. Alternatively, panties could also be dropped at designated collection centers, but the collection centers were quickly overwhelmed with the demands put on them.
Compare this to the difficulties of organizing a protest march at a specific time and place, a traditional model of protest that doesn’t benefit from the possibility of organizing collective online actions that consist of aggregated modular and granular individual tasks.
Finally, Nisha Susan displayed great media savvy by holding a series of press conferences to publicize the campaign. Nisha is a journalist herself with Tehelka and realizes that “participatory media is most effective when it is able to push up important stories into the legacy news media.” Media attention is part of the reason why the Indian blogosphere’s protests in the 2005 TOI-Mediaah! and the 2009 NDTV-Kunte cases were limited to online chest-thumping while the 2005 anti-IIPM campaign and now the Pink Chaddi campaign resulted in successful offline action.
The three elements aren’t unique to the Pink Chaddi Campaign. For instance, the same three elements also led to the success of President Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign. The campaign tapped into the US citizens’ frustration with the Bush administration and their desire for real change. The campaign did a great job of creating a compelling message around the theme of change and Obama’s African American background itself acted as the viral tweak. The campaign also created MyBarackObama as a community for its supporters and enabled them to collaborate with each other to bring their shared vision to life. Finally, the campaign developed tools that made clever use of modulaity and granularity to agrregate small individual actions like giving a small donation, writing a blog post, organizing a local event, or making get-out-the-vote calls, into a well-coordinated campaign.
Conclusion: Questions in the aftermath of the Pink Chaddi Campaign.
There are many unanswered question at the end of the Pink Chaddi Campaign.
The first question is: was the campaign really successful?
The answer is the universally unsatisfactory “it depends”. The campaign was undoubtedly successful in terms of creating reach and engagement but it’s not sure if it brought about any real change.
Let’s talk about reach first. More than 50000 users joined the campaign group on Facebook. More than 300 blogs linked to the campaign blog. More than 150 news stories mentioned the campaign. These are unusually high numbers for a grassroots online campaign in India. At the same time, the media attention also helped Shri Ram Sena and brought its leader Pramod Mutalik into national limelight (Zubin Driver at IBN Live and D P Satish at IBNLive).
In terms of engagement, the campaign generated interest amongst both men and women both in India and internationally. It also started a serious debate in both mainstream and participatory media over who gets to define Indian culture. At the same time, we must remember that the debate was limited to a small minority of Indian elites. I don’t think that the campaign changed the views of the Indian mainstream and it might even have alienated them — and I’m talking about the educated, urban Indian mainstream here, not villagers in Eastern Uttar Pradesh (Sagarika Ghose at The Hindustan Times and Swapan Dasgupta at TOI).
Finally, in terms of impact, the campaign did mobilize significant offline action. Getting Indian women to send 2000 pink panties to Shri Ram Sena is no small achievement. The public debate around the campaign also forced Shri Ram Sena to back down on its threats of disrupting Valentine’s day celebrations. However, as many observers have pointed out, the campaign didn’t really change anything. Public opinion on Shri Ram Sena is still divided in India and most of its leaders are unlikely to be punished by law.
The second question is: what happens now that Valentine’s Day is over?
We have seen before that successful online citizen activism movements that are organized around an event often fail to keep the momentum going once the event is over. I have written before about Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement Facebook Group which floundered after its original purpose was served.
Nisha Susan is trying to maintain the momentum of the group by asking them to stake a claim for our shared culture by creating one minute videos about what Indian culture means to each one of us. It looks like a plan the might work, but only time will tell.
Cross-posted on MSFS 556: Social Media in Business, Development and Government and International Values and Communications Technologies.
