Coming of age, sort of

This election is a bore. No issues, no leaders, no agenda and, thanks to the glum types at Nirvachan Sadan, not much festivity. But it marks...

This election is a bore. No issues, no leaders, no agenda and, thanks to the glum types at Nirvachan Sadan, not much festivity. But it marks a turning point, for it is the first to be fought in cyberspace. Every outfit with a halfway decent poll ad budget has established a presence up there. National parties are rubbing shoulders with Indian leather exporters, cabinetmakers, travel agents, gewgaw wholesalers and general-purpose mountebanks.

All very exciting, but what’s it in aid of? Internet advertising is the cheapest form of publicity known to man, but parties have to be pretty stupid to think they can work the percentages by putting up Web pages. Of course, stupidity is a disease that besets the whole political class.

A strong Web presence can be a political factor only in the West, especially North America. Out there, computer literacy is high and industry and campuses are heavily wired. There are people who may not watch much TV and buy only the weekend papers, yet spend three hours a day every dayon the Internet. In the US, citizens can even vote over the Internet, making for a pretty neat package sufficient unto itself.

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But the Indian voter will get to know of political Web pages only through the pages of the newspapers. In India, connectivity figures are abysmally low, even after allowing for the fact that a single personal account is likely to be used by upto four people. Of those four, at least three will have no use for the information, thanks to the evening news on TV.

So the only people actually depending on these pages for information will be Indians overseas. And in that market, the BJP is about two years ahead of the competition. It was the only party to go in for a Web presence early because it was the only one with a large support base overseas. It felt that a little propaganda on foreign shores couldn’t hurt. And given the cost of 100 per cent recycled paper, what better medium than the Internet?

But even before the BJP launched its page, its supporters in the UK had managed tostart up their own forums between hectic bouts of temple-building. Today, there are about a dozen newsgroups discussing issues related to Hinduism and its debatable link with nationalism in the alt hierarchy.

Apart from disseminating the tenets of Hinduism revisioned, this clutch of newsgroups also has entertainment value. This is the battleground where the shock troops of expatriate Hinduism and Islam clash and call each other names. It is diverting, watching the Hindus of Hampstead Heath and the Muslims of Kentish Town fight it out to digital death. The fresh entry of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad with a Website of its own should see the combat thicken.

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But what of the other parties? It is unlikely that anyone overseas knows or cares about the CPI(M)’s ingenious solution to the oil pool deficit (just tax somebody) or wants to know how the Ajeya Bharat Party will ensure self-sufficiency through Vedic agriculture. None of the parties is likely to get the kind of support — material or otherwise — overseasthat the BJP got from Hindus in absentia, with fonder hearts.

The bottomline is that these Web pages are for offshore consumption. It’s the sort of situation that is best classified as infructuous, because the Representation of the People Act does not allow NRIs to vote through embassies and consulates. No one who actually uses these sites will be able to exercise their franchise based on their information content.

So what’s it all in aid of? Well, a few Indian undergraduates in US campuses will hopefully tune in and think wistfully of home. Ageing Tamil businessmen will go mushy all over at the sight of a youthful Jayalalitha on the AIADMK home page. And Indians overseas will be able to proudly assure everyone that despite the political instability in India, the parties back home have come of age. Hey, they’re even on the Internet!