Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (32 page)

Even now people will approach me [from] … any village. I ask who was the booth
adhyaksh
[chairman] who was in charge of the booth, what is his mobile number, whether you were associated with me in the last elections, whether you are still in touch with the booth
adhyaksh
. So I will know whether he is my man or not my man. And the booth
adhyaksh
will also get an honour—that ‘I am being remembered. I am being consulted on each and every matter if it pertains to my booth’.
⁴⁹

Such close contact was only possible through the mobile phone. Given the warmth the phone conversations engendered it was not surprising that party workers ‘had their own phones. They were not given by us. [They were] very happy to use their phones’.
⁵⁰

In the UP elections of 2007 committed workers of a well-established organisation deployed a new and especially suitable technology. Opponents quickly copied the techniques, and five years later, the BSP government was overwhelmingly defeated at the polls. The victorious Samajwadi Party of the 2012 UP elections was led by Akhilesh Yadav, who at 39 became the youngest state Chief Minister in Indian history. Yadav applied lessons learned since 2007. He cultivated the network of workers and followers established over a lifetime by his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and toured the state for weeks, often—recalling Kanshi Ram’s ‘cycle
yaatras
’—by bicycle. The iconic photograph of his campaign showed him riding a bicycle, mobile phone clasped to his right ear.
⁵¹
(See
Illus. 26
). His party won 224 seats in a house of 403, an even better result than the BSP in 2007; the BSP in 2012 was reduced to 80 seats. Polling was remarkably fair and peaceful, and voter turnout of 60 per cent of the electorate was the highest in Uttar Pradesh history. Every party, it appeared, now exploited mass-based mobile-phone connectivity to chivvy voters to the polls.
⁵²
Mobile phones were only as effective as the people who connected to them. It was not enough simply to collect phone numbers and provide party workers with mobile phones. Workers had to work; they needed to be motivated by beliefs and convictions; and they needed to coordinate to tell their party’s story consistently and relentlessly to voters.

Limits, lessons and possibilities

Elsewhere in the world mobile phones and digital technologies produced varying results in electoral politics. In the South African elections of 2009, the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party, heavily supported by white South Africans, built ‘a complex “Obama-esque” campaign website’ aimed at computer users. But their attempts to use mobile phones were ‘marginal to the campaign’, according to Marion Walton and Jonathan Donner.
⁵³
The African National Congress, the ruling party with the largest following among black South Africans, developed a mobile-phone-based site that allowed chat and exchange between users. Although this attracted a ‘core group of young ANCYL [African National Congress Youth League] activists and supporters’, it fell into disuse after the elections.
⁵⁴

The Indian contrast is notable. P. L. Punia used his mobile-phone network after his election to keep in touch with workers and supporters in his Barabanki constituency. For the supporters, there was the reflected glory of being in touch with a Member of Parliament whom they had helped to elect, as well as the possibility of help from their leader in life’s struggles. The difference lay in the perceived usefulness of the phone. While the South African election campaign was in progress, the networks built around the phone had some point, but their users were not necessarily party workers with assigned tasks. In contrast, Punia and his party workers had mutual expectations and satisfactions that continued after the campaign. Two-way self-interest kept connections alive in the Indian example; passive connections attenuated in the South African one.

The ease
and reach of the mobile phone made it a potent tool for transforming actions that some people intended to be ‘private’ into actions that became very public. The Rodney King case in Los Angeles in 1991 showed the repercussions of video-recording. An assault on a drunken African-American driver by four Los Angeles police was recorded by a bystander with a clumsy home-video camera. Having been rebuffed by police authorities, the man who made the recording took the videotape to a television station. The broadcast of the tape led to two court cases, riots in which more than fifty people died and the jailing of two police officers.
⁵⁵
In the twenty-first century, mobile phones gave billions of people the capacity to do what the bystander with the video camera did in Los Angeles in 1991.

From Africa to Russia, simple mobile phones enabled ordinary people to record misdeeds and report them quickly and relatively safely. In Ghana, a coalition of NGOs produced a manual for election monitors in 2004; it contained no mention of mobile phones. However, by the time of the Ghanaian national elections in December 2008, mobile phones had become the monitors’ key weapon: ‘a big deterrent to politicians because all eyes are watching’, according to a representative of the NGOs.
⁵⁶
In Russia in 2011, ‘Smartphones used as election monitor’ headlined the
International Herald Tribune
and recounted how ‘a small-town mayor’ had been videoed offering large sums of money ‘to a veterans group in exchange for votes’. The recording was quickly on You-Tube, and the mayor, though a member of the ruling party of Vladimir Putin, was fined by a court for breaking election rules.
⁵⁷

It is easy to get overexcited by such stories. There was no doubt that mobile phones partly propelled the ‘Arab spring’ of 2011, aided by innovations like Bambuser—‘Share live moments from your mobile or webcam’—a Swedish service that let users stream video from their cameras to the Web in real time. In old-world language, users became ‘live TV broadcasters’.
⁵⁸
The term ‘
sousveilllance
’—surveillance from below, not above—came into use. Fast transfer of video, photos and SMS messages from an individual to the Web helped defeat the old technique where police or offended parties smashed cameras and exposed film. ‘The police thought’, according to Mans Adler of Bambuser, speaking of events in Egypt in 2011, ‘if we take all the phones, we can control information. But they didn’t. The message still got out’.
⁵⁹

One does
not need the 400 pages of Morozov’s
Net Delusion
to spot excess zeal in the enthusiasm for mobile phones as political tools for powerless people. Politics is about how power is distributed and used. Stalin asked how many divisions the Pope had. In the twenty-first century, the question might be modified: how many divisions does a mobile-phone owner have? The answer of course is none, though mobile phone owners could ring for troops, if they had the phone number, if there were troops available and if the commander answered the phone. Phones alone are powerless without responsible third parties willing to act.

Such institutions can develop. CGNet Swara evolved in tribal areas in the centre of India. A journalist, frustrated at trying to report about people living in remote areas and speaking languages that were not part of mainstream India, helped to devise a news service based on simple mobile phones. The Gondispeaking people of the hilly, isolated parts of the state of Chhattisgarh had no newspapers, radio or television; most had no electricity. ‘If you are a tribal’, said Shubhranshu Choudhary, a founder of CGNet Swara and a former reporter for the BBC, ‘you have no source of any communications’.
⁶⁰
These tribal people by the late 1990s lived under conditions that made them ready, if accidental, recruits to India’s rural insurrections inspired by the ideas of Mao Zedong.
⁶¹

CGNet Swara depended on penetration of mobile phones into remote areas. By the time it began in February 2010, cell phone towers were prevalent enough to cover large swathes even of distant, rugged tracts, and mobile phones themselves were sufficiently cheap and widespread to make them familiar tools, rather than magic wands waved only by the powerful. Indeed, the government of Chhattisgarh was troubled by various cell-phone related ills, such as dozens of illegal towers put up by eager operators, and school teachers and students distracted from their duties by their mobile phones. The towers were threatened with closure, and use of mobile phones was banned in the state’s schools.
⁶²

As with
so much that is effective about mobile phones, CGNet Swara was simple. It made local concerns in a local language available to worldwide audiences.
⁶³
(See
Illus. 27
). Tribal people with a story to tell rang a number and got a message telling them to push ‘1’ on their keypad if they wanted to record an item of news or ‘2’ if they wanted to hear items on the day’s bulletin board. The submitted news items were vetted by Gondi-speakers and other journalists, and if validated, put on the server as part of the day’s news. An English-language digest went on the website and as a daily email to the computers of subscribers. Digest No. 2736 with eight items, for example, was sent on 29 November 2011. It described a village in Andhra Pradesh in south India where there was no electricity, but the village’s six mobile phones were charged once a week when people went to the market town. ‘The network is not great’, Choudhary said. ‘Nagendra [his contact] would call me from a tree top, and I could only leave SMS messages for him to call me because I knew he would get that anytime he was in the network range’.
⁶⁴
Not surprisingly, there were demands that CGNet Swara be closed for violating India’s broadcast laws. Officials and powerful people got offended, Choudhary said, when ‘a person from the rural areas reports and it gets translated and the activist in the city takes it to the right place’ to get redress.
⁶⁵
Although only the Indian government was allowed to broadcast news on radio, the mobile phone was ahead of the law: it was not a radio; it was just a phone; yet to those who were exposed or offended, CGNet Swara quacked like a radio. ‘Mobile technology’, Choudhary argued, ‘is better than radio. Mobile is a two-way communication’.
⁶⁶

The service not only disseminated news to tribal people as never before—orally and in their own language—it turned travails of daily life in remote places into ‘news’. In a celebrated case—tribal India’s Rodney King event—people in a village near Bilaspur, 600 kilometres west of Kolkata were frustrated at being abused by a local official who owed them wages for work on government-sponsored projects and refused to sign them up for further employment to which they were entitled. There were four cell phones in the village, and although the village had no electricity, a nearby hill allowed them to pick up enough signal to connect to a mobile network. (See
Illus. 28
). The next time they waited on the officer and were abused, they quietly recorded the conversation and, safely back in the village, passed it to CGNet Swara where it became an item that quickly caught the attention of government. Mainstream media reported on it, and ‘the State government ordered immediate action against the officer’. (The village subsequently received some of its entitlements.)
⁶⁷

Shubhranshu
Choudhary of CGNet Swara hoped that ‘mobiles can truly democratize communications’. Elsewhere in this book, we argued that the mobile phone shared characteristics with The Equalizer, the holster-carried, hand-held repeating revolver that made firearms in the Old West usable by everyone, not just by the strong and the practised. In
Network Power
, David Singh Grewal hints at ways in which mass mobile phones have the potential to enable significant political change.
⁶⁸
‘Network power’, he contended, results from the evolution of ‘standards’, ways of doing things that become dominant as a result of large numbers of people voluntarily adopting them. It is not that such ‘standards’ are inevitable and the
only
way; it is simply that, for reasons that are not always clear, very large numbers of people adopt a standard, and the more who do so, the more the power of a standard grows—the more others join or follow. The small snowball rolls into a big, unstoppable one. The ‘standard’, and of course the people who exercise some control over it, become powerful.

In the past, the capacity to propagate the ideas or the material objects that became ‘standards’ was confined to elites.
⁶⁹
But the autonomy provided by mobile phones equipped every holder to become a broadcaster and for the first time gave individuals the chance to build widespread followings and connections. By providing even poor people with the capacity to ‘network’—to link up, communicate—the mobile made possible the creation of affiliations beyond the control of the rich and better-connected.

Imagine, as Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman do in
Networked
, that large numbers of people acquired the ability to record and transmit the transactions of their everyday lives—‘lifelogging’, it’s called.
⁷⁰
The experience of the Baiga people in Chhattisgarh and their abusive local official showed that such recording was not difficult. It could become commonplace—a ‘standard’—for poor people dealing with officials or other power-holders to record the exchange, put it on a website and use the pressure of numbers to guarantee that business was done according to rules and laws. Would new standards of public conduct result and relations between people of different statuses change? The old fear of nobilities that underlings would come to know too much and be able to exchange such knowledge widely and freely would be realised. Or perhaps not. Rainie and Wellman also speculate about a future of government surveillance and digital ‘double agents that … report back to the authorities and sell information to corporations’.
⁷¹