dna edit: Noise, not substance

Catchy slogans, personal attacks and stirring oratory have added colour to all general elections.With the advent of social media as a potent campaigning tool and a potential gamechanger, the 2014 polls promise to be different. Equations are expected to change. The individual — for long constrained by limitations of physical human interaction, space, time, money and access to public platforms — has become a strident, and visible, political voice on Facebook and Twitter.
Unfortunately, instead of contributing to a new culture of engagement, both politicians and ordinary netizens are finding themselves increasingly trading or warding off barbs online and offline.

Congress leader Manish Tewari’s response to the BJP selling tickets priced at Rs5 for Narendra Modi’s public meeting at Hyderabad epitomises the pitfalls of social media driven politicking. “Baba Pravachan ticket Rs100-100,000. Cinema ticket Rs200-500 even for box office flop. Ticket to hear a CM Rs5. Market discovers true value,” tweeted Tewari, before equating the BJP’s fundraising tactic to fascism. For a political class, starved of credibility, such responses might sway or irk partisans on either side, but does it make for intelligent discourse?

Most voters will agree that the issues for 2014 are cast in stone. It will be a referendum on the performance of the incumbent UPA government. The Congress is edgy about any discussion centred around a stuttering economy, monumental corruption, and its poor governance record. The BJP’s reliance on Modi has ensured that secularism will be an equally important concern.

With so much at stake, one would expect these parties to send out clear messages to social and traditional media consumers. Instead, we have had farcical Pappu-Feku battles, dangerous puppy-burqa analogies, and political figures like Modi and Digvijay Singh stoking one unseemly controversy after another.

The first creative use of social media in India was by the 2011 India Against Corruption movement which successfully tapped popular angst against corruption scandals. While the BJP had a headstart on the Congress in leveraging social media, its supporters began a culture of negative campaigning that Congress supporters are also increasingly resorting to ever since Modi’s virtual coronation in Goa this June.

For these supporters, the recent developments in the Ishrat Jahan case was an opportunity to settle political scores on Twitter and Facebook. Their partisanship overlooked the dangers of fake encounters. In fact, the much-maligned Parliamentary debates (when they happen) and television news channel debates appear civilised and more engaging than social media interactions and politicians’ public pronouncements.

At the end of the day it is the voter who loses. The real deal — a chance to question a politician, or watch them debate, on relevant issues, whether on Twitter or Facebook, or in a televised debate like in the US presidential elections — must not be lost sight of.