Friday, December 6, 2024

Amogh Sharma's "The Backstage of Democracy"

Amogh Dhar Sharma is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. He has previously worked as a Departmental Lecturer in Modern South Asia Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at the Queen's College, Oxford. His research interests include comparative politics, political communication, and the political economy of development in South Asia.

Sharma applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, and reported the following:
From page 99:
The Computer and the ‘Computer Boys’

After Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October 1984, Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as the PM, and two months later the party achieved a landslide victory in the general election. Although as the PM, Rajiv Gandhi had less time to devote to managing intra-party affairs, nonetheless data collection and computer-based analysis continued to form the two legs of his plan of professionalising the party. Assisting him in the process was a growing team of advisors comprising technocrats, civil servants and business and media professionals. In his speech at the INC centenary celebrations in Bombay in 1985, Gandhi lashed out at ‘power brokers’ in the INC and promised to purge them to strengthen the party (R. Gandhi 1985). To operationalise this plan, he turned to Sam Pitroda to prepare a detailed vision document charting out the course of reform in the party (Nugent 1990, 64–66; Pitroda and Chanoff 2015, 147). Satyanarayan Gangaram ‘Sam’ Pitroda was an engineer and entrepreneur who had returned to India from the US in the early 1980s. Soon after, he was appointed as Gandhi’s advisor on the government’s ‘technology missions’ and played a major role in India’s telecom revolution. A close confidant of Gandhi till the end, Pitroda also played a crucial role in managing the INC election campaigns in 1989 and 1991 (Merchant 1991, 283; Nugent 1990, 66; Pradhan 1995). Gandhi’s reliance on technocrats like Pitroda, who had no formal associations with the INC, was indicative of his suspicions about the efficacy of most party bureaucrats and his tendency to bypass the party’s organisational machinery in the hopes of eventually reforming it.

Soon after being elected as the PM, Rajiv Gandhi introduced a programme for creating a computerised database of all members of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. In September 1985, a pro forma was circulated among all INC MPs asking them to provide details of their educational qualifications, tax history, language proficiency, marital status, number of children, countries visited by them, previous membership of political parties, history of association with the INC, public meetings and rallies addressed by them in their constituency, nature and duration of visits to their constituency and their participation in parliamentary proceedings. A similar technique of computerised data collection had previously been trialled among MPs and MLAs in Bihar. The purported aim of this exercise was to provide Gandhi with easily accessible information about all INC MPs ‘at the push of a button’, in the hope that ‘[t]his [would] help remove groupism and prejudiced selection[s]’ in the formation of parliamentary select committees. In other words, the INC computer was to act both as a virtual panopticon that could…
It appears that the Page 99 Test only partially works for The Backstage of Democracy. While the excerpt certainly reflects some of the key themes that run through the book, it doesn’t manage to capture the central focus – namely, election campaigns! From the excerpt above, the reader may rightly surmise that the book focuses on the interface between technology and politics in modern India, particular the tendency of technological fetishism (for example, centered on computers, as in the case of the passage that has been quoted) and the role and power that technocratic elites enjoy in political decision making. However, it may give the reader the faulty impression that the book is more historical in its orientation than it actually is. The primary focus of the book is to explore the changes that have taken place in India’s election campaigns over the last decade. The roots of these changes can certainly be traced to the 1980s and the section above is part of the book where I flesh out this contextual overview.

Nevertheless, I am quite glad that the Page 99 Test threw up this section. Writing this section of the book was notoriously difficult because of a lack of adequate archival material and because key interlocutors were not available to be interviewed. But in the end, this was also the part of my research that was the most analytically rewarding and enjoyable. At times, it felt like almost a detective story – piecing together the most disparate clues on how India’s political elites in the 1980s had started using computer technology and large-scale data gathering to rethink how electoral strategizing and intra-party politics could be managed. For readers interested in the longer story, the book awaits…
Learn more about The Backstage of Democracy at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue