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by Varun Bubber

Ask someone in India what pops into their head when you use the term "political activist" and they will probably describe a swarthy, sweaty kurta-clad chap wearing a Nehru topi or a saffron scarf as he hectically rushes around, preparing a rally venue, fetching chai, or corralling journalists for his candidate. You know the type-the guys that eagerly assemble at a moment's notice when a neighbourhood neta decides to gherao some local business for not displaying dual-language signage or blacken the face of a college principal for some perceived slight.

The passing of the Right to Information Act (RTI) in 2005 led to the rise of another sort of political activist: the diligent volunteer willing to stand in lines in government offices for hours to pry facts from the vice-like grip of reluctant bureaucrats. These RTI activists rose to prominence and caught the attention of the media by exposing government inefficiencies, corruption, and several other cases of bureaucratic malfeasance.

This election season, however, gave birth to a new breed of political activist: the web warrior. Indipepal profiles five of these activists, each of whom is using the Internet in unprecedented ways in India to get their particular message out.

Marketing for Milind
Govind Shorewala is 20 years old and decided to work for Milind Deora's campaign in an individual capacity.The Congress MP contested the Mumbai-South seat, and amassed an army of young volunteers to help canvass for votes in his constituency's wealthier areas. Govind first met Deora during a program at Mumbai's HR College, and decided that he wanted to contribute to his campaign for re-election. Inspired by US President Barack Obama's successful Internet campaign, Govind set about replicating it for Deora, centering the online effort on a "Youth for Milind Deora" Facebook group that drew over 2,000 members. Govind also recruited a team of eight volunteers to moderate the discussion on the group and create fresh content for its members. The team was also active on the discussion boards of the top Indian news sites, ensuring that any criticism of their candidate is quickly countered with a list of his accomplishments. Govind has found that online campaigning leads to people being more "receptive and open-ended, not getting irritated as they would with a telemarketing call." He believes that India's youth will prove a critical force this election season, and hopes that his online efforts would go a long way in ensuring Deora's re-election.

Stumping for Shashi Tharoor
Kenney Jacob and Brijesh Nair are both young techies with links to Thiruvananthapuram and who spearheaded the effort to get bloggers around the web to support the candidate of their choice, Shashi Tharoor. Jacob and Nair are first-time political campaigners, but have been blogging for a long time, and so focussed their effort for Tharoor on targetting the blogosphere. "Almost 10 per cent of Trivandrum's population has access to the Internet," says Jacob. "Most of these people are politically neutral and are willing to vote for a candidate with a difference. We just needed to reach them, that's all."

And reach them they did: teaming up to form "Bloggers for Shashi Tharoor," the duo posted about Tharoor on their personal blogs, recruited 60 other bloggers to write about him, and began to aggregate content related to their candidate from around the web. Nair also used Twitter and social media to spread the word about Tharoor-he retweeted all the articles and blog posts about Tharoor that he could find and posted them on the India section of Reddit, a popular aggregation website as well.

Jacob leveraged his technical skills by creating "Vote for Shashi Tharoor" badges that bloggers could use to indicate their support and also sending out viral SMS's and emails to reach those among the electorate that don't read blogs or use social media.The two are confident that their online effort will help Tharoor emerge victorious and believe that "neutral voters of Trivandrum" have overwhelmingly voted for the candidate they have worked for so assiduously over the past few months.

Compiling it All
This election season has also been unique in that it has seen the creation of a plethora of websites by candidates, NGOs, and media organisations. Add to this the hundreds of blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook/Orkut pages created and what you get is a holy mess just begging for someone to step in and catalogue it all. That someone is Gaurav Mishra, a social media enthusiast and the Yahoo! Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet at Georgetown University. Mishra created a database called "India's First Digital Election," a comprehensive wiki-based listing of digital initiatives, media coverage, and blog coverage related to the 2009 Indian elections.

Mishra has also written extensively about the use of the Internet and social media for campaigning on his popular blog, where he has discussed media coverage of the elections and the effectiveness of the online campaigns of various parties.

Tracking Violations on the Web
However, Gaurav's most significant contribution thus far is Vote Report India, a citizen-driven election monitoring platform on which the electorate can report election violations for the Election Commission to take action on. Voters can report these violations by SMS, email, Twitter, or a form on the website. These reports are then forwarded to the Election Commission for investigation. Even though it was launched just a few days before the first phase of polls, reports of violations flooded in and the site generated a tremendous amount of buzz in the blogosphere.

Vote Report India (VRI) is a hugely collaborative project, and represents a deployment of existing technologies Ushahidi and Swiftriver especially for the 2009 Indian elections. Gaurav is just one among the core team of 14 behind VRI and reports that the site went from "concept to launch in two weeks." Selvam Velmurugan, founder of emoksha.org and a VRI core team member, says that the objectives behind VRI are two-fold: first, to "provide a means to citizens to report/view/discuss issues during elections/polls" and second, to "instill a participative mindset among citizens (by making the process easy and rewarding) to enable similar initiatives in other areas of governance."

Next on the agenda, he says, is "a local governance initiative called FixOurCity, which is another open/collaborative platform to let citizens report/view/discuss local issues." The next steps for VRI, says Selvam, are "closing the loop" by ensuring that violations get reported to the Election Commission and "scaling" the service to elicit increased participation. Plans are also afoot to use the technological platform developed for VRI in other elections around the world, "starting with Lebanon in June 2009."

India's First Digital Election?
So what's behind this flood of online activists? Gaurav, who has been studying the adoption of social media in BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) as part of his fellowship believes that India is witnessing its "first digital election" in which the level of participation from "political parties, civil society organizations, media houses and even corporates has been nothing short of amazing." However, he's certain that these online efforts will not hold enough sway to change election results; however, he maintains that voter-participation efforts such as Jaago Re and the like have "undoubtedly been successful."

Gaurav believes that the high level of social media adoption for these elections will, like Obama's campaign did in the US, make "businesses, civil society and government organizations seriously engage with social media" post-elections. In India, he reminds Indipepal, "the biggest impact of social media campaigns is still in terms of getting mainstream media attention."

It's hard to determine the impact of the efforts of these online activists mid-polls. Thus far, their presence has seemingly had no effect on voter turnouts - all three phases of polling in the country have only yielded moderate voting percentages. Only after the results are in and statistics about voter participation and the like are available will we be able to figure out how and where online campaigns helped sway voter's opinions, and which forms of media were more effective than other. However, one thing is certain: Election campaigns will never be the same in India again.