More and more political parties are leveraging the web to raise funds and reach out to India's younger voters.
If Telugu Desam Party (TDP) founder N T Rama Rao used his on-screen depiction of Lord Krishna to reach out to voters in Andhra Pradesh (AP) in the 1980s, his son-in-law and current TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu, who projected himself as uniquely tech-savvy when he was AP chief minister, has tried “morphing” into another image in his attempt to reach out to voters over the Internet.
On the TDP's website for UK-based NRIs, not only has Naidu morphed his face onto a photograph of Obama with the White House in the background, but he has also started an online contribution campaign — just as Obama did during his US presidential campaign.
This image of Chandrababu Naidu’s (his party, incidentally, has an electoral alliance with the CPI-M) will set apart the 2009 general elections from all the ones past.
The general election of 2004 was the first time political parties leveraged technology to campaign — text messaging was common and so were pre-recorded messages, notably from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, exhorting people to vote for their party.
The union of Indian politics with the world wide web is the next inevitable step.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate L K Advani has been among the earliest off the blocks in trying to replicate Obama's Internet-based campaign drive.
BJP has raised an army of 7,000 political volunteers through www.lkadvani.in, the official website of India’s shadow prime minister for the Lok Sabha election.
“We are overwhelmed by the online registration of volunteers, offering to work for the BJP,’’ said Arun Jaitley, party general secretary, who, last week, had inaugurated the first “BJP volunteers club” in Mumbai.
He said the party was planning to launch at least six similar clubs in major cities in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election. These volunteers, Jaitley said, would be unofficial campaigners for the party in the coming election.
Pradyut Bora, an IIM-Ahmedabad graduate who heads the BJP’s team of volunteers that manages Advani’s website from a central Delhi bungalow, claims that www.lkadvani.in has turned out to be the largest Indian political website comprising 800 pages, 400 pictures and 250 videos.
In terms of response, the website generates about 15,000 to 20,000 unique visitors per day. “We expect the hits to touch half a million in next one month and one million closer to the Lok Sabha election,’’ Bora said.
TDP's IT manager Sudhakar R V told Business Standard that the portal for online contributions was launched two months ago.
The website uses the services of PayPal to handle payments that it receives online. The contributions received so far “are not in lakhs or crores of rupees,” but the purpose of the drive is to involve netizens, especially UK- and US-based NRIs, to further TDP's cause, said Sudhakar.
Though the TDP's main website is in Telugu, its English versions have portals on which net-users can post their thoughts, read Naidu's messages and give names and addresses of their friends and family to the party's data-base for future reference.
Prajarajyam, the youngest party contesting the Lok Sabha elections, launched by Telugu film star Chiranjeevi in 2007, is also opting for an extensive web campaign.
Prabhakar Parkala, general secretary of the party, said his party would specially reach out to middle-of-the-pyramid voters who use the Internet regularly in AP. The 18-35 age group, especially students and professionals, is the target demographic group for the party's e-campaigning, he added.
In certain constituencies, this age group numbers almost 90,000 voters and could determine the outcome of the election, he added.
The party's website does not support online contributions yet, but this could be a possibility soon, said Parkala.
Vishvajit P Singh, ex-Congress MP who is in charge of the party's computer section, said the Congress website, which was redesigned for the 2004 general elections, is being revamped along with the media cell's website to make both more interactive.
When asked whether any Congress leader would maintain a blog like Advani’s, Singh said the Congress was not interested in the “me-too” game. However, the Congress website would have a new section devoted purely to the upcoming elections. It would have details of the candidates, campaign speeches, songs and slogans.
