Does technology empower everyone?
Internet has changed the lives of millions. This Lok Sabha poll will tell us, how it can affect the political career of Indian leaders, where 60 per cent of the population still lives in villages and most do not have access to the Internet
LAL KRISHNA Advani will advertise his poll campaign on 2000 websites, according to a news agency report. The poll campaigning on the net is a new trend in India. Advani is likely to become the pioneer of this trend.
BJP has five official websites. Advanis’s website is the most popular these days. Narendra Modi and Shivraj Singh Chauhan also have their own website. BJP stalwart Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi also started his website and blog recently to address the issue of global warming and other environmental issues, though political issues are also there. BJP has its own official website and also owns one more website which is called friends of BJP’s website. BJP is also present on Orkut and Facebook; both are well-known and very popular social networking sites among netizens. Internet has been chosen as one of the best medium for campaigning in the next LS elections by India’s most ’traditional’ party.
Narendra Modi has 4966 supporters on FaceBook group far more than 297 of LK Advani. He is the first among all the Indians with the largest support base on FaceBook. Manmohan Singh is in second position with 2590 members in his FaceBook group. Rahul Gandhi is third with 1982 supporters followed by his mother Ms Sonia Gandhi, who has 988 supporters. Atal Bihari Vajpayee is also there with 158 net supporters. There are some other leaders of different parties with nominal support base.
There are social networking sites and online forums. There are not less than 1000 online groups, forums on Indian political parties and their leaders. Most of the national and regional parties have their online presence with poor layout and design. Only a few of them are designed well.
Internet poll advertising and fund raising was one of the innovations of US President Obama in the US elections this time. There are ample number of ways today to advertise on the Internet. There are websites like Adsense/Adword, Netclix, Bidvertiser and lots more to provide facility to advertise anything on the net. YouTube is there to upload the election speeches online. Congress is also trying to follow the trend and has started uploading the speeches of Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and other senior leaders on YouTube.
Internet penetration has increased in India and this has become the best place to attract the audience which has no time to go to attend the public meetings or gatherings of the political parties. It will surely attract software engineers, NRIs, industrialist and other elite people, who can get the access of leaders’ speeches inside their air conditioned office cabins or in their bed rooms with the click of a mouse.
Internet has changed the lives of millions. This Lok Sabha poll will tell us, how it can affect the political career of Indian leaders in the country, where 60 per cent of the population still lives in the village and most of our people do not have access to the Internet. Forget about Internet and computers, they do not even have proper electricity supply for irrigation or to light their houses with CFL. Proper roads are not present in many villages for daily commuters. Students are dropping out after primary classes. Farmers are committing suicide. Migrants are beaten up in other states because they are going away from their home to get jobs.
In such an unpleasant situation, Internet is the best medium to keep your eyes closed from all these problems because in the virtual world of the web politicians need not go and listen to the problems of the people on the ground. They need not to feel the plight of the people by standing beside those who do not have even basic facilities. In India, Internet will not be as successful as it was in the US because we are India not the US. Most of the US citizens have easy access to computers and internet but every Indian does not have even access to two meals a day. My dear politicians of the great nation called India; choose the technology to empower the vote bank but empower the people first, so they can access it.
Login
 Login through Social ID
|
