In many ways, the current Indian election is India’s first Internet election. Granted that the last few set of elections in 2009 also had a significant internet coverage, none of the major political parties were able to exploit the platform to any degree.
This time, things were different. Both of the national parties, the BJP and the Congress, and to some extent the newcomer — the Aam Aadmi Party, were active on social media throughout the election.
Narendra Modi’s supporters developed a Twitter extension that allowed him to send personalised Holi wishes to all of his followers. Arvind Kejriwal reached out to his primarily middle-class-educated user base by participating in a Google Hangout. AAP also maintained a blog and online profiles for proposed candidates as well as a record of incoming donations — we can expect the other political parties to soon follow suite.
The coming of age Indian parties were also complemented by novel initiatives by the voters themselves — with initiatives such as myneta.info which tracks information about the nominated politicians and makes it available to the public, and The 545 — a blog on politics that draws heavily from RTI information.
Tech giant Google also played its part in this election by organising a campaign that encouraged Indians to vote, including a viral video about India’s first voter which got over 2.5 million views on YouTube.
Not all the news is positive, however, these also stand as an evidence that the political parties are flexing financial muscles and hiring PR agencies and call centres to influence votes online.
A recent example of this is the TIME magazine poll which was hijacked over the last few days by automated bots trying to influence the results, resulting in over 15 million fake votes. Sites like myneta.info will help people immensely in the upcoming elections.
