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| March 20, 2000 | ||
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| POLITICIANS'
WEBSITES Netaji.com Whatever happened to all those websites candidates launched at poll time? Take a tour of Indian cyber-politics. By Ashok Malik
So much for editorial content. So must for archival value. So much for personal insight. Later, another pa suggests you visit sahibsingh-bjp.org/profile.htm but warns you'll get a "site under construction" message. "You see," he says, "during the elections, we put Vermaji's campaign schedule on the Net. Now that's over. So we're still figuring out what to do with the site." Six months is a long time in politics -- and an eternity in information technology (it). As the general election campaign gained momentum in the autumn of 1999, a series of politicians jumped onto the dotcom bandwagon and inaugurated their personal websites. Today, the sites are caught in a time warp -- having outlived their electoral utility and governed by politicians who have a vague notion that it is a good idea but don't quite know the next step. pmindia.nic.in -- the official web address of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee -- is a more recent effort and went online on January 26. As Kanchan Gupta, osd in the Prime Minister's Office and the man who conceived the site, emphasises, "This is not an Atal Bihari Vajpayee site, it is the site of the Indian prime minister." It is, then, institutionalised rather than incumbent specific. It is also easily the most successful site, averaging, to quote Gupta again, "as many as 82,000 hits a day". In contrast, Munde says his site has attracted "over 22,000 visitors since it was inaugurated on July 31, 1999". sharadpawar.com boasts a similarly-strong guest list. Given that it represents the hub of the Union government, pmindia.nic.in has some decided advantages. It takes you on a visual tour of the prime minister's drawing room and the cabinet room, locations most Indians will never visit. It also conducts a weekly opinion poll -- running from Tuesday to Monday -- and is the "first government of India site with this facility". To ride piggyback on a larger site is a trick Digvijay Singh has certainly learnt. If you try to access mpchiefminister.com you get a message saying "moved to madhyapradesh-india.org". The visitor finds his attention moving to "the tiger state of the world", facts about the land and people, government policy and, of course, a mechanism to send e-mail to the chief minister himself. soniagandhionline.com is a bit of a disappointment in that it only allows you to ask the Congress president a question and offers a link to indian-congress.org -- the party site "conceptualised and designed by rave -- Radical Alternative Vision Environments". If you want to know more about Sonia you have to visit indian-congress.org/president/profile.htm. Apart from recycling information -- suitable newspaper reports like "Munde drives rickety car to office" or online reviews of Ravindranath's book on Pawar ("Well-researched and well written," says N. Mahajan from the US; "Horrible," says a reader from Burlington, VT) -- the sites provide little exclusive information. What purpose do they serve then? Well, they perform three tasks. One, they are the politician's tribute to technology and affirmation of being keyboard-friendly. Pawar's site, in between listing good wishes from his fans and reproducing his speeches, announces computer training is mandatory for workers of the NCP. Munde, who surfs the Net for "at least half-an-hour every day", talks of the website being an "essential means for transparency and communication". As he sees it, "A politician is a busy man, he is not always available. If you want to contact him, make an anonymous suggestion or complaint, you can use his site to send him e-mail. Feedback is so important for all of us." As Maharashtra home and electricity minister till October 1999, Munde received some 10 complaints a day; he says he stills gets some 30 e-mails a week. Geeks would gawk at a website being used as a cyber post box -- but try telling the netas that. A bureaucrat in Digvijay's office mutters, "We didn't know there were so many people from our state living abroad till we started receiving e-mail." The e-mail deluge is the basis of an idea bank. One young lady wrote to Singh from Singapore suggesting that Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of her adopted home, be "employed as a consultant by the Madhya Pradesh Government". The final function of these websites is to reach target audiences. Pawar, for instance, is clearly aiming at an overseas constituency. Nothing else can explain the detailed pictorial coverage of Pawar attending an NRI conference in New York in 1998. Seen in this light, Culture Minister Ananth Kumar's website (ananth.org) is probably the best designed. The "household name in his Bangalore (South) constituency" has exploited the Net penetration in his home city to run a very local campaign. Apart from a relatively imaginative photo gallery (Ananth at one, Ananth at two, Ananth with wife and so on), there is an outline of constituency projects, right down to the roads that are being widened. Obviously, Bangalore's reputation as India's technology capital gives Kumar's website a utility few other MPs can match. If you think that's good, don't. Just
drop into georgewbush.com,
"virtual campaign headquarters" of the man who hopes to be the
next president of the US. The site not only allows you to sign up as a
campaign volunteer, it even helps you make a contribution by cheque or
credit card. |
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Visit
www.sharadpawar.com, cyber-home of the
well known politician, and click on the icon saying "biography".
What you get is a link to amazon.com, the Net-based bookshop, and to a book
called Sharad Pawar: The Making of a Modern Maratha, written by one P.K.
Ravindranath and priced $14.