THE GREAT INDIAN (S)ELECTION
The greater reliance on data and new forms of communication in India’s electoral campaigns has created a cottage industry of political consultants and data experts who lend their services to political parties and candidates, mapping constituencies and helping them target voters through these new tools. Shivam Shankar Singh, a data analyst and former BJP campaign analyst, provides an insider’s account of digital campaigning in India. In seven chapters, Singh chronicles his journey serving various parties, detailing the part of political consultants, the role of technology and data in micro-targeting voters, and the attempts parties make to influence voters by appealing to local ascriptive identities and emotions.
One merit of the book is an insider’s candid admission of what is already known: the current regulatory void regarding data and privacy in India enables parties to gather vast amounts of data on voters, data that most would not entrust political parties with were their permission explicitly sought.
The chapters dealing with graver forms of manipulation, such as fake news, are written in general terms and do not bring much more information than what an informed reader would have already gathered in perusing the daily press. Nor does the author dwell much on the sources of disinformation, or on its organised nature.
Throughout the book, voters are often reduced to narrow sociological categories, such as OBCs, Dalits, Hindus and so on. This is what data-driven electoral mapping does: sorting voters with complex identities into reductive sociological boxes, assuming that these categories can be linked with predictable electoral behaviour. Barring a few social groups specifically aligned with certain parties, most voters belong to groups that are by themselves politically irrelevant, for being too poor, too small or too geographically scattered. Survey data tells us that the proportion of undecided voters has considerably grown in recent years and that many decide during the last phase of the campaign—two indicators that voters’ decisions cannot be predicted solely based on their sociology or income level.
Those who look at electoral politics through a narrow lens often tend to overstate the importance of their own field of expertise. The BJP undoubtedly possesses competitive advantage with regard to data, voter-targeting and so-
While Singh’s book contains insider anecdotes, readers would gain from Cheeseman and Klaas’ handbook of electoral fraud
cial media presence. But the fact that the party’s electoral performances have greatly varied since 2014 shows that data handling alone is not the key to winning elections.
Recent research in India and elsewhere shows that social mediabased strategies and communication have a greater mobilisation effect on a party’s existing base than a persuasive one on its competitors’ supporters. In other words, fake news and propaganda encourage one’s supporters to mobilise and participate in elections, but rarely sways supporters of other parties. In Singh’s account, voters come across as gullible and passive recipients of political propaganda.
All told, Singh’s contribution contains interesting insider anecdotes on the functioning of the BJP’s data operations. The book, however, falls short of providing new insights on electoral politics, especially to those already acquainted with other recent books, such as Prashant Jha’s How the BJP Wins or Swati Chaturvedi’s I Am a Troll. The author’s choice of placing himself at the centre of the book’s narrative might stem from a desire to make the book accessible to a broad audience, but it does so at the expense of analytical depth and contextualisation of what is, after all, only one aspect of electoral campaign and strategies.
Readers interested in matters of electoral integrity would gain from reading Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas’ riveting handbook of electoral rigging and fraud, a clinical account of the methods used by authoritarian regimes to manipulate or coerce voters and influence electoral outcomes. Although written with authoritarian regimes in mind, the book details mechanisms that underlie some electoral practices common in India, such as vote buying, use of violence and polarisation as an electoral strategy and digital manipulation. The two political scientists’ main conclusion is that improving the quality of elections is key to preventing or curbing temptations of manipulations that are inherent to the exercise of concentrated power.