IT and political parties a clash of cultures

In the offices of political parties, information technology (IT) is confined to databases on election results, demographic profiles of constituencies, GIS mapping of constituencies and so on.

Perhaps the most glaring example is that of the Congress "� the 'modern' party of Rajiv Gandhi. The Congress got into the IT mode only in 1995, when it set up a computer cell at the office of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in New Delhi. The cell, even now, has six computers and as many persons manning it.

Apart from stock databases, information drawn from reports of party observers and chiefs of district and state units are tabulated.

There seems to be little beyond this. While the office of the party president Sonia Gandhi (who is supposed to suffer from techphobia) is computerised, the AICC office does not have even a limited LAN system in place.

Rooms of office-bearers do have computers but these are stand-alone systems and used mainly by the secretarial staff. Those who want to surf the internet at the office do so through dial up connections from individual modems.

Early in 2003, some sections of the media carried reports that a proposal to computerise all Congress offices up to the district level and connect them through an intranet had been shot down by party leaders.

It is probably a measure of the lack of transparency in the party that it is impossible to get these reports either confirmed or conclusively denied.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) office, in contrast, seems more tuned in to IT, especially with party president M Venkaiah Naidu being the driving force. All organisational and administrative work has been computerised, as have the media and election cells.

The party office does not have a LAN yet, except for one linking the computers of typists and a server for the internet. Party leaders say that all offices across the country will be computerised and an intranet will link them by 2004.

In early 2003, the party president's office acquired a videoconferencing facility and Naidu holds regular discussions with around 10 state units of the party which have a similar facility.

The only party which is using IT to corporatise party functioning is the Telugu Desam Party (TDP). The party headquarters at Hyderabad is connected to 23 district and 1104 mandal-level units through a dedicated line.

The mandal offices are supposed to collect and periodically update information about their areas of jurisdiction "� the status of government projects, the state of civic amenities, feedback from the people and so on. This information is sent to the district offices and then transmitted to the party headquarters.

The entire 7.8 million membership base of the TDP has been computerised, with records of members' photographs and signatures.

During inner party elections, these records are supplied to all mandal offices for them to tally faces and signatures with people coming to vote. The records also help the party determine whether membership is bunched in certain villages or is more widespread.

Naidu conducts videoconferences with party functionaries periodically, with the party maintaining a calendar of such events "� once a fortnight for village level units, monthly meetings for mandal and district units and quarterly meetings at the head office.

Before these quarterly meetings, opinion muster roll (OMR) sheets are scanned and sent to all mandal offices. The OMR sheets have questions seeking people's opinions about the local MLA and MP. The sheets are filled and sent back to the party headquarters and the results are then tabulated.

These results then form the basis of a performance review of each elected representative at the quarterly meetings and selection or denial of the party ticket for various elections.

In addition, all MLAs are graded on the basis of 12 performance indicators and anyone found slipping up is immediately alerted.

Yet few party MPs admit to having an email address and even fewer know the party's email address.

Almost all the national parties and several regional ones have a website, all of which have the same features, with some minor variations "� party history, ideology, constitution, leadership profile, electoral performance, performance in government, election manifestos and key speeches.

However, this is another bit of IT tokenism, much like computers in party offices. Some websites seem to have become defunct, others just do not upload and yet others are hopelessly outdated. None of them makes a serious attempt to communicate to the public or even the party rank and file.

Only the Samajwadi Party website (https://bsmedia.business-standard.comwww.samajwadiparty.org) has information about party membership. All the websites are in English, the sole exception being that of the Samajwadi Party which has an English and a Hindi option. While the Shiv Sena (www.shivsena.org) has links written in Hindi, the text that they lead to are in English.

The BJP website (www.bjp.org) is overseen by senior party leader J P Mathur. A visit to the site indicates that it is updated daily and press releases are regularly uploaded on to the site. The site also has links to websites of state units and the party's youth wing.

It is not clear if the Congress does or does not have an official website. The party had inaugurated a website with great fanfare in the late 1990s, but that fell by the wayside.

Another website (www.indiancongress.org ) was up in May-June 2003 but is no longer accessible. This website claimed it was updated each day.

But the press releases all dated back to 1999; the Congress president's speeches covered only 1998 and 1999 and there are were details about party executive meetings, barring a list of Indian National Congress sessions from its inception in 1885 to 1997. Worse, no one in the party had any idea of who was managing the website.

Several politicians have their own personal home pages and some of these are more interactive than that of the parties they belong to.

Apart from the obligatory resume and a list of achievements, some "� like that of former power minister Suresh Prabhu or Union minister Ananth Kumar "� invite feedback about the politician's performance and suggestions about what they should do.

Whether the politicians regularly check their email and respond to those writing in will always remain unknown.

Moreover, there is a tendency to post only hagiographic messages, as in the case of the website of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.

Mainstream political parties can learn a thing or two on how to use IT from the various insurgent movements in the country.

Separatist groups of the northeast "� the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), the Tripura People's Democratic Front, the Revolutionary People's Front (RPF) of Manipur "� have websites which are hosted on geocities.com, as is the website of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF).

The Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) website is posted on angelfire.com.

The ULFA site provides links to the sites of the other groups of the northeast, barring the NSCN. The websites of all the northeast insurgent groups are managed by their respective departments of communication and publicity.

The website of the RPF of Manipur has links to an e-newsletter, Ningtam Ehou, hosted on Yahoo groups which is called 'a email group publication of the seven sister states information of the liberation struggle, news, publication etc with the RPF as the group moderator.'

The fortnightly newsletter has been updated as recently as 6 July 2003. The JKLF website has a guest book on which visitors can post messages.

To its credit, it not only displays messages sympathetic to the Kashmir cause and encouraging the JKLF but also messages haranguing the Kashmir separatist movement and abusing Muslims.

Apart from their mission statements, explaining the cause and history of their struggle, all the websites spew venom against the Indian state and security forces.

All of them also carry a list of people killed by the security forces. The ULFA list names a 'Perpetrator' after every victim while the names of victims on the JKLF page is separated by a red line, signifying dripping blood.

If IT and politics haven't mixed very well in India, it has to do, in varying degrees, with the low penetration of IT, poor infrastructure, low literacy levels and the educational and professional qualifications of politicians. But the biggest glitch, undoubtedly, is the nature of Indian politics itself.

In fact, the main advantage of IT "� transparency "� is perhaps the most compelling argument against it. As a Congress member puts it: "We are on the frontiers of technology but, at the same time, are in the backwaters as far as mindset goes."

The ability of IT to empower people through the free flow of information scares politicians who, according to Desai, founder-president of public relations firm IPAN, live in constant dread of their circles of influence diminishing.

'They understand that there is a knowledge base that they don't have and this scares them.' Prabhu concurs with this view: 'Knowledge is power, but in politics, one's power comes from another's lack of knowledge.' And then there's the dread of hacking.

According to an apocryphal story within the Congress, one of the strongest advocates of an intranet gave up his crusade when his email was hacked and congratulatory messages sent to a senior minister in the BJP-led government.

In a feudal political culture which thrives on coteries, politicians are uneasy about anything that cuts hierarchies or reduces the power of patronage.

As one Congress MP remarked: "We say we are a great democracy but the basic unit of a democracy "� the political party "� is not democratic at all."

Party leaderships want blind obedience to policies and the idea of explaining a position to cadres is an alien concept. Tracking performance indicators of politicians is also seen as an amusing indulgence when factors other than performance determine the distribution of tickets.

The resistance to IT now takes a more covert form. Realising that openly opposing IT will show them up in a bad light, politicians agree on its usefulness but tend to dismiss it as an elitist indulgence, divorced from the myriad problems of the 'real India'.

The blame, according to Shivraj Patil, former Speaker of the Lok Sabha, lies equally with tech-savvy politicians. "Those addicted to computers often fail to understand the emotional aspect of politics. Politics is all about emotion and human psychology." Impersonal statistics and printouts, he says, create a mental barrier to understanding people's problems.

For Indian politics to take to IT in a big way, a major cultural change is required within the political system.

Unfortunately, that seems a long way off. The attitude to IT is best summed up by a senior BJP leader who could well have been speaking for the entire political class: "We are a political party, not a business office. The limits of political functioning have to be maintained."