Authors: Robin Jeffrey
Kanshi
Ram died in October 2006, less than a year before the party he founded came to power in its own right in the biggest state in India. In 2005, however, the BSP seemed stalled, capable of winning only about 20 per cent of the vote in Uttar Pradesh, which roughly reflected the Dalit population of the state. Mayawati’s biographer wrote that from 2005, ‘she sat down with her aides … to plan’ for the coming elections. She increasingly welcomed the advice of Satish Mishra (b. 1952), a Brahmin lawyer who had been advocate-general (legal adviser to the government) of UP and then her legal adviser.
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The arithmetic was enticing. Dalits constituted about 20 per cent of UP’s population; Brahmins were more than 10 per cent. If large numbers of Dalits and Brahmins, coming from different ends of the old social hierarchy, could be induced to vote for the same candidate, it could produce a winning foundation.
At first glance, a Dalit-Brahmin association seemed implausible. In its early years, the BSP had constantly berated high castes.
Tilak taraaju aur talvaar, unko maaro juuti chaar
was a particularly catchy slogan: ‘Brahmins, Banias and Rajputs—beat them with shoes’. But Brahmins in UP had been sidelined in political equations, ‘orphaned by the changing contours of the two parties [Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party] that had claimed to represent their interests’.
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From 2005, the BSP, with Satish Mishra as a diligent link with Brahmin groups, campaigned to convince Brahmins and Dalits that a Brahmin-Dalit association made sense and that to vote for the BSP would serve the interests of both. The method of propagating the message, as described by Mishra and journalists, involved dozens of meetings around the state to set up
bhaaichaara samitis
: brotherhood committees reaching down even to the level of individual polling booths. The committees, made up of Brahmins and Dalits, disseminated the message that Brahmin-Dalit unity was desirable because it could bring electoral victory and a government sympathetic to the needs of both groups.
A polling station was based on about 1,000 voters, and with 130 million voters, there were more than 120,000 polling stations in UP in 2007. The BSP, and the
bhaaichaara samitis
that grew from it, did not create organisations at every polling station; but they established thousands of polling-station-level committees in all 403 constituencies. Dedicated BSP cadres then got to work using the party’s six-tier system. At the top of a leadership pyramid, Mayawati and her inner group developed strategy, which was transmitted downwards from state party leaders to divisions, districts, constituencies, sectors and ultimately polling booths. At each level, there were workers willing to devote time and energy—and their mobile phones—to the party. Kanshi Ram had created the framework and recruited faithful workers over years of cycle
yaatras
and touring. ‘To this day it is the cycle
yaatris
and the DS-4 cadres who play a role akin to that of Mao’s cadres of the Long March’, an observer asserted in 2007.
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Mishra, the Brahmin link man, and his collaborators held scores of meetings, at which local people were inducted into
bhaaichaara samitis
and instructed in how to organise similar meetings themselves. They were also given responsibility for regular liaison with the BSP hierarchy. Mobile phone numbers were exchanged, lists of workers and their phone numbers assembled and thereafter messages were regularly passed up and down the chain by voice and by SMS. Workers received inspirational messages, talking points, tasks, target dates and directions about how to prepare for visits by party leaders. These regular connections with thousands of workers would have been impossible without the mobile phone. (See
Illus. 25
).
The mobile phone
allowed an intricate network to be created, kept fresh and made to do electorally effective work. The numbers involved in the BSP and in the evolving
bhaaichaara samitis
reached tens of thousands. Downward came regular instructions on precise activities that party workers were to undertake at particular times: ensure that all potentially favourable voters in your area were on the rolls; take particular care that all eligible (and potentially favourable) women voters were enrolled; explain why the Brahmin-Dalit alliance was beneficial; remind people of the terrible state of law and order in UP under Mulayam Singh, the incumbent Chief Minister; and emphasise what would be done under a BSP government. BSP slogans were witty and instructional: ‘
Chad gundon ki chhati pe, button dabaa do haathi pe’
(to get rid of the goondas [the incumbent government], push the elephant button’ [the BSP’s symbol on the voting machine]).
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This cellphone traffic increased as the election campaign began. Such messages came in the form of SMSs in Devanagari and English. A BSP official in Lucknow showed Doron a page in his files headed ‘important numbers’, which listed the mobile numbers of key figures. Workers at his level maintained regular communication with superiors, especially during the election period when they reported about needs and requirements at sector and booth levels.
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This top-down direction was constantly informed and refined by bottom-up communication.
How important really was the mobile phone in this system? The question might be put another way: could anything like this have been made to work without the mobile phone? Basic communications in UP were poor, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The ‘road network [was] one of the lowest in the country’ relative both to population and area.
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Eighty-five per cent of Dalits lived in villages. Wealthier, higher-caste neighbours could sometimes prevent Dalits from moving freely in their own villages and from going out to visit others. Strangers could be prevented from visiting Dalit areas of a village or could find their visit closely scrutinised. To alert and inform hundreds of people needed only a few mobiles. A single call could leap barriers imposed by illiteracy, bad roads, long bus rides, uncertain postal services and hostile neighbours.
The mobile
phone helped in another crucial task: explaining to potentially sceptical audiences why Dalit-Brahmin cooperation was a good idea. The success of the
bhaaichaara samitis
depended on telling a convincing story. The BSP’s long-standing unpopularity with the mainstream media made the role of personalised explanation especially important. Owned by caste-Hindus and with virtually no Dalits employed in editorial duties, major newspapers and television channels were disdainful of the BSP and often hostile to Dalit-oriented policies.
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The BSP under Kanshi Ram and Mayawati had reciprocated the disdain and hostility. In 1996, BSP workers roughed up media people who were said to have insulted Kanshi Ram and Mayawati.
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‘The BSP leader’s constant refrain about a biased
manuvadi
[caste-Hindu] media’, wrote Mayawati’s biographer, ‘was an accurate description’.
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The diffusion of the cell phone counteracted some of these disadvantages. It enriched networks, made widespread frequent communication possible and involved people who would rather speak and listen than read and write.
Satish Mishra
recounted how he spent three months from June 2005 touring every district in Uttar Pradesh and covering 23,000 kilometres to form
bhaaichaara samitis
and convince people why they should participate in the committees. It was difficult, he said, but he and his associates explained why age-old prejudices should be put aside and how they could be overcome. Afterwards, these committees were kept in touch and directed by mobile phones. Every member of the new organization, down to the level of the booth committee, had a mobile. The organization did not provide the mobiles; people had them already and were willing to use them for party work. Mobile phones kept workers motivated by reminding them of their tasks and keeping them in regular touch with the party organization.
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The ability to converse was crucial. Since the national elections of 2004, politicians had experimented with mass voice messaging; the effects on voters were hard to gauge but mixed at best. Prime Minister Vajpayee’s voice messages to hundreds of thousands of voters in the national election campaign of 2004 were judged by many to have become an annoyance. Initially fascinated by the calls and wanting to talk back to the Prime Minister, people soon discovered that the traffic was only one way. On the other hand, a state Chief Minister, Narendra Modi of Gujarat, used the same technique in his state’s elections of 2007, and the messages were said to have been relatively well received.
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However, as the mobile phone became available to ‘the masses’, the masses expected to be spoken to as individuals. The mobile phone’s ability to provide one-to-one conversations was more influential than its mass-mailing capacity.
The BSP organization and its mobile phones helped the party get voters to the polling booths. The elections in 2007 had the lowest overall turnout of voters in Uttar Pradesh since 1985 (about 46 per cent). It was the lowest Dalit turnout (44 per cent) since 1991. However, among the rest of the population (i.e., everyone except Dalits), 2007 marked the lowest turnout (46 per cent) in 30 years and nine elections. When populations lose interest in elections, the party with the strongest organization—the party best able to identify its supporters and get them to the polls—fares best. In 2007 in Uttar Pradesh, that party was the BSP.
The prevalence of mobile phones among officials and activists made these elections remarkably free from intimidation. UP elections had a reputation for bullying and violence, but an increasingly assertive Election Commission of India, armed with fast tip-offs from tens of thousands of mobile phones, imposed unexpected discipline. Polling took a month, carried out in seven phases to allow police to shift from one region to another to supervise voting. The Election Commission strictly enforced guidelines for fair conduct of elections and brought in police from other parts of India to improve impartiality. All this could have happened without mobile phones, but the mobile permitted rapid reporting and response to breaches of the guidelines.
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All election agents had mobile phones. It needed only one observer and one phone call to draw attention to misbehaviour, even at remote polling stations.
In UP
in 2007, this was doubly important for the BSP. First, the ruling Samajwadi Party had a well-deserved strong-arm reputation. In the past, a party with such capacity captured polling booths, stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated voters. Dalits were particularly vulnerable. They could be prevented from voting or coerced into becoming tools of vote-managing thugs. In 2007, however, people with mobile phones—election agents of the various parties, election officials and ordinary citizens—were present at every polling station. The phone numbers of election authorities were widely publicised and citizens encouraged to report irregularities. Many mobiles had a camera. Intimidators ran the risk of being photographed, and the old practices of smashing the camera or seizing the film were less likely to succeed: a photo on a mobile phone could be quickly forwarded to authorities or uploaded onto YouTube. None of these possibilities would have mattered, however, had there not been in place an energetic Election Commission with an effective police force.
Other political parties in 2007 lacked the dedicated structure of the BSP. The mobile phone enriched organisational possibilities, but it did not create them. In the case of the BSP in 2007, a well-drilled army had replaced slingshots with repeating rifles. Other political aspirants saw what the partnership between the mobile phone and the BSP achieved. One observer was P. L. Punia (b. 1945). An Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and a Dalit, Punia was principal secretary to Mayawati when she was Chief Minister in 1995, 1997 and 2002. ‘Punia knows about the structure and methodology of the BSP’, an official told a journalist in 2009.
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In the
national elections in 2009, Punia won the constituency of Barabanki for the Congress Party with a majority of 167,000 votes.
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His methods recalled those of the BSP in 2007:
Before the election … it is easy to appoint a booth-level worker, but it’s very difficult to keep them mobile and keep them activated. And that is what I did through mobile phone, and also through the material I sent off and on continuously before the election. The mobile did work …
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The mobile made it possible to give booth workers tasks, for them to be in touch with the candidate and to feel that they were playing an important role in the campaign. Punia’s team gave them constant activities:
[We told them] what they are supposed to do for the day—that is, the revision of electoral rolls, issue of identity cards, constitution of booth committees: … that you should have representation of women, you should have representation of Scheduled Castes, you should have representation of Backward Classes, and you should have the representation of the most dominant caste … So give them [booth committees] some work or the other and not allow them to remain idle.
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If the organisation was to be kept ready and useful, the sense of personal one-to-one connection continued afterwards: