The Gap Between Civic Engagement and Collective Action

In the last two days, three different journalists have asked me why the voter turnout in Mumbai has decreased to 44.21% in spite of voter registration initiatives like Jaago Re and transparency initiatives like Vote Report India.

I have been shocked by the low voter turnout myself and will be reflecting on it over several posts. Here’s my first attempt to answer that question, partly through the Vote Report India lens.

Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. Here’s a brief description of Vote Report India and here’s the story behind the project.

We have had 170 odd reports so far on Vote Report India whereas I was expecting close to a thousand reports by now.

Also, most of the reports are web reports, which is surprising given that we had a SMS short code and users could report incidents by sending a SMS starting with VoteReport to 5676785.

In terms of the content of the reports, most reports reference a news report. Election Commission Interventions is the most popular category, followed by Voter Bribing, Violence and Inflammatory Speech. The categories with first-hand experience — Forged Vote, Voting Machine Problems, Voter Name Missing and What Went Well — have had few reports.

So, it seems to me that in spite of more than a hundred blog posts linking to us and a dozen media stories, we haven’t been able to reach out to the people who actually went out to vote and experienced a problem.

So, I’m a little disappointed with what we have been able to achieve with Vote Report India. I have written about some of the challenges we have faced in my post on the limitations of technology in election monitoring. Still, we have two more weeks and two more election phases and we will be tweaking both the technology and the outreach to increase usage.

Stepping back from Vote Report India, I do believe that this was an unprecedented election for India in terms of online voter registration, transparency and outreach initiatives.

In my series on the 2009 Indian elections, I have been writing about election-related internet and mobile initiatives from political parties, civil society organizations, media houses and corporates and tracking the reactions they have generated online.

These initiatives have tapped into the sense of outrage after the Mumbai terrorist attack, channeled it into constructive conversations, and created an online space for civic engagement. It is because of this groundswell that people like writer Shashi Tharoor , danseuse Mallika Sarabhai and ABN AMRO India chief Meera Sanyal stepped up to contest the elections.

Perhaps, these initiatives haven’t resulted in a significant increase in voter turnout (and the Voter Turnout in Mumbai has, in fact, decreased) but they have laid a foundation for engaging India’s urban middle-class youngsters into serious civic issues. Talk is cheaper than action, but civic engagement must predate collective action. It’s a cycle we have seen in the US. In 2004, online engagement didn’t get the nomination for Howard Dean, or the presidency for John Kerry, but it set the foundation of the netroots movement that Barack Obama tapped into in 2008. The 2009 elections in India are similar to the 2004 elections in the US.

Perhaps, in 2014, we will see a charismatic leader emerge on the national scene, who will capture the imagination of India’s youth. In these elections, neither Congress nor BJP had a charismatic prime ministerial candidate leading from the front. Also, young people in India are disappointed with the sycophancy in the Congress, wary of the communal extremism in the BJP, and alarmed by the fragmentation in Indian politics as a result of the growing power of the regional parties. Therefore, we have seen discussions on section 49(O) and negative voting ever since the Mumbai attack. Hopefully that will change in 2014.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.