Many in the country may not have realised it, but the 2009 general elections must be the first web-election ever held in India, not surprising since the e-mail, the SMS, the web and the voice-drop are of recent development. That politicians have taken the initiative to use them itself is significant. The times, they are a-changing. Way back the only way politicians could reach out to the public was through extensive travelling, which must have been, to say the least, exhausting. Like LK Advani, now in the early eighties, they are still travelling, but now they have additional means to approach the voters, as The Hindu (10 May) correctly noted. Campaign managers of both the BJP and the Congress have been reaching out to inboxes and mobile phones as never before.
According to the Hindu reporter, the BJP campaign has had a data bank of around 10 lakh e-mail addresses in each constituency it has been contesting, which is a fabulous number. It seems that during the 2006 campaign, the DMK, for instance, sent out a lakh e-mail and received 50,000 replies, something that surely indicates that the electronic age has already come of age Mr KR Raghavan, the BJP in-charge of the media campaign in Tamil Nadu, went one step further to plan the “voice-drop”. The phone will ring and when you pick it up, heard will be the voice of LK Advani asking for your vote. Through the website lkadvani.in, 1250 volunteers had signed up, certainly an indication of its effectiveness.
It was apparently the BJP which foresaw the use of the electronic media and went for it in a big way, to be followed by the Congress. Now both parties are using YouTube and Google Adwords, not to speak of Facebook. Given India’s internet-user base of 40 million this was only to be expected but does one seriously think that there will be any substantial change in the receiver’s voting pattern? Sevanti Ninan, writing in The Hindu, believes that contrary to fashionable belief in political and popular circles, the web’s influence on the elections this time is negligible. For all that, he adds: “When you come down to brass tacks, the truly mobilising web technology in this election may just prove to be the e-mail.” Technology is overtaking India.
Interestingly, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has not been as aggressive at electioneering as many expected. Is her influence in her own state on the decline? At least Newsweek magazine just does not seem to think so considering that it featured her on its cover in an early April edition. But it was sharp in its assessment of her work. While commenting on her “suspiciously ostentatious fortune” and her “limited accomplishments” on behalf of the socially-oppressed dalits whose cause she claims to champion, the weekly said her possible bagging the prime ministership would “ironically end up bolstering the caste system that has kept them (dalits) in chains”. But to appear on a Newsweek cover itself is a remarkable achievement. The prime ministership she can never get.
There has been much talk of Narendra Modi as a Prime Minister, probably to embarrass him or to bring about a rift between him and his party colleagues. Modi has been strenuously denying any desire to be a Prime Minister. He has enough problems on his plate to entertain high ambitions. The Supreme Court, besides has directed the Special Investigation Team to probe his role—or possible role—in the post-Godhra riots. Is there any political angle to it? Say Deccan Herald: “Nobody would believe there was any political angle in the court’s decision. But it would have been more appropriate if its timing was different. Even the uncertain political reactions to the court’s directive underline this point.” Modi has been cleared so often by so many investigative bodies that the court’s decision comes as a surprise.
Reference was made to it by The Free Press Journal (April 29) in a sharp editorial. The paper granted that “to the extent it helps unravel (Modi’s alleged role) the apex court order is unexceptionable” but it noted that “there is no gainsaying the suspect timing of the court’s intervention”. Modi, said the paper, was not likely to be fazed by the latest ploy of his traducers, considering that the Gujarat High Court had rejected the same PIL against Modi and others. It added: “If the apex court has now deemed it fit to order the SIT to inquire into the role of Modi and a number of his ministerial colleagues at the time of the riots, nobody, least of all the person specifically named in the PIL, is likely to lose his sleep.” And the paper made the point that if Modi can be claimed, so can be Indira Gandhi “under whose tenures a number of far more horrendous communal incidents had taken place”.
For any paper to say that, in these days of secular madness, takes courage. But then The Free Press Journal has always been known to be a paper of courage. It even had the courage to stand by the BJP, which has been demanding that the black money stashed away in foreign countries by many anti-national elements in India is recovered. The Congress reaction to this has not only been dismal but disgusting. Wrote The Free Press Journal to its eternal credit: “It says something about the mindset of the Congress that on an issue which brooks neither delay nor diversionary debate, the party has chosen to indulge in worthless polemics.”
The courage to face truth is a rare quality and The Indian Express has often exhibited it. Praise to it was bestowed recently by the Chief Justice of India, KG Balakrishnan at the time of delivering the Ramnath Goenka Awards in Mumbai. Justice Balakrishnan was referring to the “increased likelihood of journalists using intrusive news-gathering methods and editors approving of content where facts are not often verified or reported without explaining their proper background.” “This tendency,” Justice Balakrishnan said, “of resorting to undue sensationalism or reporting only one side’s viewpoints is especially worrying”. But that, alas, is what is increasingly being noted, not only in the print media but also in the electronic media! As the Chief Justice emphasised, “As more and more Indian become literate and gain access to television and computers, there is also a commensurate responsibility on the news media establishments to present accurate and balanced reports.”
Actually, it is the television media that should be called to order considering that the literate has access to a lot of written material while the illiterate has to largely depend upon what can be watched on the TV screen. And yet to think that the government has seldom taken this into consideration. More than the print media, it is the electronic media that deserves to be curbed.
