beyondbrics

While India’s anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare casts himself as a traditional protestor in the Mahatma Gandhi tradition, his supporters are employing the latest telecommunication techniques to spread the message.

Facebook updates, tweets, Blackberry messages and bulk text messages are in the armoury of Hazare’s internet-savvy middle-class aides. So have money-saving tricks – popular in cost-conscious India – that allow the Hazare campaign to reach even the poorest mobile phone users.

A favourite approach is the missed call subscription service in which would-be supporters can register by ringing a campaign number from their mobile and dropping the call before it is answered. The caller’s number is logged automatically and added to the distribution list for campaign text messages.

Hazare’s page on facebook has 352,741 likes at the time of the writing the piece and this figure is  growing rapidly. On twitter, Jan Lokpal bill, username after the controversial bill, has 87,419 followers . India Against Corruption, one of the campaign organizers, report that they have 21m people registered using the “missed call” facility.

“I left a message on facebook and texted 50 people to organize a protest in front of the Prime Minister’s house yesterday, 100 people turned up. Today there are going to be more,” Abhimanyu, a 20-year old campaign organizer for the India Against Corruption movement told beyondbrics.

A blockade outside the Prime Minister’s residence On Thursday was advertised on Hazare’s page; while phone apps for smartphones give minute by minute updates on the movement.

Meanwhile, supporters, including a teacher and a nurse, told beyondbrics that they follow the news section of the ‘Campaign Against Corruption’ website to get the details of the next organised protest.

Your beyondbrics author’s facebook feed is rife with the ‘Angry Anna’, a version of the hugely popular Angry Birds iPad game developed to spread the word.

Unsolicited text messages, e-mail and bbms have been received in FT’s Delhi office too. While some just share details of protests, others are directed at boosting feelings of national pride and duties.

“If you have much, give away of your wealth. If you have little, give of your heart. What you want to give to your nation; What you want to give to your nation,” reads one.

While another one rephrases the John F Kennedy quote to indicate the realities of giving and taking from the state, which are at the heart of the protests. “Don’t ask what the country has given to you, ask what you have given to the country,” it reads.

In a country with a low internet penetration of around 8 per cent, according to the consulting firm Burson-Marsteller, the use of facebook and twitter in organizing protests has become a tell-tale sign of middle-class nature of the protests.

“This is the first time digital social media has resonated with such a large number of people,” Nishant Shah, head of research at the Center for Internet and Society think-tank, told Reuters.

“But this is far more of a middle class, urban movement, than a national movement. Many people in India are excluded from it.”