Authors: Robin Jeffrey
Yet such
extravagant critiques did not gel with India’s circumstances. They overlooked the fact that in the past some groups were excluded—banned, prevented—from various kinds of communication and information. They were victims of a pervasive exclusion, based on social class and ideas about caste, that few places in the world could equal. From the end of the nineteenth century, such exclusions were challenged, but they remained effective in parts of India in the twenty-first century.
‘Smart organisations’ in India
The practice of ‘untouchability’, enforcing discrimination based on caste, was outlawed by Article 17 of India’s constitution of 1950. But in practice, caste discrimination continued. Without political will and the power to enforce it, constitutional statements and paper laws about equality were unlikely to mean much in daily life, as activists argued and as ordinary people knew. The lowest-status people were the poorest, those with the lowest levels of literacy, the least chance of education and the greatest dependence on superiors.
B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) was an ‘Untouchable’. He was also one of the two or three most significant Indian political figures of the twentieth century. A graduate of Columbia University and the London School of Economics, Ambedkar spent his life struggling against vicious discrimination and attempting to organise the dispersed, despised and desperately poor who as ‘Untouchables’ constituted 15 per cent of independent India. His watchwords, wrote a devotee fifty years after his death, were ‘Educate, Organize and Agitate’.
13
All three activities cost money and took time, skill and the capacity to communicate. None of this was easy in Ambedkar’s day when nearly all Dalits (a term preferred by ‘Untouchables’ since the 1970s) were poor, fewer than one in ten were literate and a postcard took days to move from one town to another. In such an environment, one can begin to see how a cheap mobile phone might make a difference. If the Spanish elections of 2004 were a ‘turning point’ in media history, the Indian election involving Dalits and mobile phones in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in 2007 was a landmark.
Ambedkar’s message
that political organisation and political power were essential for the uplift of Dalits was absorbed by a remarkable Dalit from Punjab, Kanshi Ram (1934–2006). A relentless organiser and visionary, Kanshi Ram saw government-employed Dalits as the kernel of a Dalit middle class and the spear-point of a movement to capture political power. After fifteen years in government service, in 1971 he became a fulltime activist, harping on the theme that organisation leading to political power must be the goal of poor and low-status Indians.
14
In 1973 he and others founded BAMCEF (All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees’ Federation) to mobilise the talents and resources of government servants from low-status backgrounds, particularly Dalits.
15
In the 1980s, Kanshi Ram carried the message of ‘organise to win political power’ around north India by every economical means available. In 1983, his 40-day ‘cycle
yaatra
’ took the message of caste-based inequity and injustice across 3,000 kilometres and seven north Indian states. (See
Illus. 24
). When ridiculed for using such an antiquated method as a bicycle, he foreshadowed the way his successors were to use the cheap mobile phone:
Trucks, tractors, buses, car and rail are all in the hands of capitalists and those who are holding power … The very same facilities cannot be available to the oppressed and exploited people … (The) bicycle is the best weapon for them … If their two feet are all right they can reach any place to make their presence felt.
16
When a mobile phone became cheaper than a bicycle, ‘oppres sed and exploited people’ found a new weapon that could reach farther, faster and constantly.
From BAMCEF and
other experiences of mobilisation, a political party emerged—the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which began contesting elections in 1984. At first, it was regularly defeated, but in 1989 it contested 372 seats in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) legislature, won 13 seats and took nearly 10 per cent of the vote. Uttar Pradesh is the largest state in India with a population of 200 million people at the 2011 census. If UP were an independent country, it would be the fifth largest in the world, exceeded only by China, the USA, Indonesia and India itself. The BSP’s 67 seats in the UP elections of 1993 gave it a pivotal role in coalition governments and enabled Mayawati (b. 1956), a young Dalit woman and Kanshi Ram’s discovery, to become the state’s Chief Minister for the first time in 1995. She again held the post briefly in 1997 and 2002–03 before the remarkable election victory of the BSP in 2007.
In a country where successful women usually came from powerful high-status families and where low-caste people experienced constant discrimination, something was happening for a Dalit woman to become Chief Minister of the largest state at the young age of 41. An explanation partly lay in small improvements in education and opportunity, but more significantly in relentless political organisation, seeking to build on small social improvements. Kanshi Ram used all means of communication that were within the reach of poor people and took advantage of the reservation of a proportion of government jobs for Dalits, especially in Indian Post and Telegraphs (IP&T). By the 1980s, 15 per cent of lower-order government jobs in India were held by Dalits—in line with their proportion of the population—and Dalits held six per cent of higher-status government jobs. It was estimated that more than two million Dalits worked for the government.
17
During his mobilising travels and cycle
yaatras
in the 1980s, Kanshi Ram could count on telegrams being sent and delivered, telephone calls made and messages transmitted, even though phones were rare and inaccessible. India’s network of post offices extended deep into small towns and large villages, and Dalit employees were everywhere. They could usually be relied on to communicate messages about coming speakers and exhibitions and sometimes to organise such events themselves. This was in line with Kanshi Ram’s goal of using this incipient middle class of ‘educated employees who feel deeply agitated about the miserable existence of their brethren’.
18
Mayawati’s father had been an employee of Indian Post and Telegraph.
The UP
elections of 2007 brought outright victory (204 seats in the 403-seat assembly) to the BSP, the first time since 1991 that a single party had won a majority in its own right. The result was a surprise: ‘no one foresaw such a huge victory for Mayawati’, wrote a journalist who had followed the campaign. ‘In the end’, wrote another, ‘Mayawati was right [in having predicted outright victory] and everyone else was wrong’.
19
The social coalition that brought victory was based on an unlikely partnership between Brahmins, the highest of castes, and Dalits, the very lowest. Together, these two groups accounted for more than 30 per cent of the population of UP. If most of them could be persuaded to vote for the same candidate, such a candidate would have a strong chance of victory in a first-past-the-post, multi-candidate election. But how was such instruction to be imparted convincingly, widely and relentlessly? Mobile phones alone did not produce this election result. But they proved essential. The BSP campaign in 2007 changed the nature of Indian political campaigning by marrying a remarkable grassroots structure with the capacity of the mobile phone to connect, motivate and organise, and to do these things even for groups that in previous times might have had difficulty in moving freely out of their villages. Ideology and technology proved a potent combination. Twenty years of bicycle-powered network-building had created the organisational capacity of the BSP. In the hands of thousands of diligent workers, the mobile phone proved a crucial multiplier. Marginalised people acquired a new and effective tool for struggling and mobilising.
In the UP election of 2007, there were echoes of the Obama primary and national election campaigns in the USA in 2007 and 2008, with similar emphasis on the
combination
of workers and technology ‘to help deliver our message person-to-person’ because ‘trust in … traditional media sources seemed to be dwindling rapidly’. The ‘marrying [of] digital technology and strategy with a strong grassroots campaign’ was common to Uttar Pradesh in 2007 and the US in 2007–08.
20
After independence in 1947, Dalits at election time in UP were often treated as additional voters for the landowners on whose land they lived and worked. Stories of landlords marching ‘their’ Dalits to the polling booths to vote as instructed were common in parts of UP throughout the first thirty years of independence.
21
Dalits in many villages were treated like children or animals, and, as we saw in
Chapter 1
, ancient scripture could be called on to validate their exclusion from information.
22
Dalit movements were restricted, they were forced to ask permission to leave the village or hold marriages and festivals, and they faced beatings or worse if they transgressed. In 1971, Dalit literacy in UP was 10 per cent. In 2001, it had reached 46 per cent.
23
Of UP’s 35 million Dalits in 2001, 85 per cent lived in villages; more than a third of those villages had no electricity.
24
At the start of the twenty-first century, Dalits remained predominantly poor, heavily discriminated against, overwhelmingly rural and more than half were illiterate.
When
Kanshi Ram suffered his stroke in 2003, the rapid diffusion of cheap cell phones had barely begun. India had about 50 million phones of all kinds, mostly landlines in businesses, government offices and middle class homes. BAMCEF and the BSP could, however, call on their adherents in Indian Post and Telegraphs. A BSP functionary recalled:
We are Dalits from a village some 60 kilometres [about 40 miles] outside Lucknow, and it was my older brother who introduced me to the party. He was a clerk in the post office, and is now retired, but in those days they used to convey the message through the telephone and tell people when Kanshi Ram was due to arrive in the train-station. This way my brother and others like him were able to organize people from the area to come and meet Kanshi Ram in the railway meeting rooms. … But now the mobile has made it very easy for us to convey our message also at village level. People can recharge for only 10 rupees.
25
During the same interview in June 2010, another senior functionary had two mobile phones constantly ringing, one of which had a screensaver of Mayawati, the Chief Minister. When asked whether the party paid for their phones or for the calls made on their phones, he replied: ‘Nothing is paid by the party; people have and use their own mobiles’. Another person sitting beside him dressed in the khaki uniform of a government servant added that this was precisely why BAMCEF members were required to be educated and have a government job: so that they did not need to rely on the party. ‘BAMCEF members are strongly committed to the Dalit cause’, he said, ‘and their work is carried [on] after working hours, on Sundays and public holidays’. He then switched from English to Hindi to reflect on the past:
We went
from mohalla [neighbourhood] to mohalla, door to door talking to people, even on Sunday and all other holidays … that was a time when people were possessed [
ham diivaane the
] by the ideology; we used to divide areas and go from village to village to organize the cadre and organize night meetings and only then public meetings. Now it is much easier to spread the word.
26
When lack of ideology and commitment was a constant refrain in Indian politics, the significance of the size and conviction of the BSP cadre was worth emphasising.
27
The BSP did not represent a heroic mobilisation of the downtrodden masses, nor did the BSP government, elected in 2007 and thrown out by the voters in 2012, transform the lives of the oppressed. But in 2007 the BSP had a large body of dedicated workers whose zeal and effectiveness were multiplied many times by their use of the mobile phone.
Mobile phones broke the price barrier in 2003–04 when the cost of a call fell below one rupee for 30 seconds. Mobiles increased in number from 13 million to 33 million in twelve months.
28
By 2005, the cost of a new cell phone was less than Rs 2,000—six weeks’ wages for the poorest agricultural labourer, but not an impossible dream for even poor families if a household had three or four earners.
29
For organizational purposes, what was important was not that everyone owned a phone but that key figures did. For getting people to meetings and for political evangelising, face-to-face was best—as the Obama presidential campaign also believed
30
—though a personal telephone call for a specific purpose was a strong second. More important, the mobile phone enabled meetings and talks to be set up quickly and effectively. And the phone allowed lower-level functionaries to be in regular touch with people higher up in the party and experience the exhilaration of receiving a personal call from a superior and to be asked to provide information or carry out an assignment. The phone connected and energised as a postcard or telegram never could. The number of phones in Uttar Pradesh more than doubled between 2005 and 2007: from 13 million to 31 million.
31
This meant in theory that one in every six people had a phone. Distribution of course was highly skewed towards the urban middle-classes, but even though coverage and penetration in rural areas were patchy, most villages could now be reached by telephone. Those phones were mostly individual mobiles, not locked up in a government office or the house of a wealthy family.
32
And as government servants, often in the Post Office or Communications departments, the Dalit activists who were pillars of Kanshi Ram’s organisation were among the first people to be introduced to mobile telephony.