- “It has long been understood that tall people generally exhibit a variety of positive attributes: they are healthier, stronger, smarter, more educated, more sociable, more liked, and more confident than short people. Hence, it is not surprising that they are richer, more influential, more fertile, happier, and longer-lived than short people.” - I work as a data analyst on campaigns, so I rely heavily on data to make claims, but my experience on the field has taught me that the enthusiasm of children for a particular candidate or party is as good an indicator as there can be to predict the presence of a wave. - While working on these elections, I realized how many of the Facebook pages people believe to be neutral are actually managed by political parties. - ‘A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.’ - These activities also transformed the Congress into being viewed as the most active party in the state and I later realized how that in itself is a major electoral advantage. <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">A party pretending to be the most active and acting like the frontrunner, is enough to make people believe that it is most likely to win, which often translates into actual support and votes.</mark> This is why before every election, all parties make grandiose claims of victory even when they know that they won’t win. - I know of enough incidents that were scripted dramas intended for public consumption and so I personally never form an opinion about any politician based on them. It might seem cynical to disregard every incident because some of them might be staged, but these instances really aren’t what a voter should be basing their preferences of a leader on. It turns out that no media coverage is as trustworthy as it ideally should be. - Twisting statements for political gain takes place with remarkable frequency in Indian politics and all sides wait for their opponent to commit unforced errors. - Through years of mismanagement, sections of the voting population had been made accustomed to corruption so that they wouldn’t even consider voting for a candidate who didn’t pay them. In such a scenario, an honest politician was unlikely to win and those who did would invariably indulge in corruption to recoup their expenses and build a corpus for subsequent elections. Corruption is as much a consequence of voters’ temperament as it is of the greed of politicians. - We also refrained from using the BJP and IPFT logos together in Bengali regions, and only used them in the tribal-dominated constituencies. The message of the alliance and the BJP’s support for tribal causes were shared extensively on WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages that had a majority tribal audience but was subdued in groups and pages where the audience was largely Bengali. - Technology has made micro-targeting a real possibility, where political parties can show different people entirely different messages based on their preferences. Such messaging can easily be done along religious or caste lines, offering encouragement to voters to support a specific party because that party would fight something that the voters have been told is a great threat through repeated messaging. This isn’t something in the realm of possibility; it is something that is already happening. - <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">I realized that most voters believed that being added to a political WhatsApp group gave them access to some kind of insider information. Instead of being irritated by the messages, they read them with gusto, in the belief that they were receiving information from a credible source.</mark> - The problem with sharing fake news online is that intent is impossible to prove, and therefore legal penalties seldom enter the picture. Anyone can claim that they were duped and never intended to share false information. The problem is that fake news is such an effective tool for moulding voters’ opinion that if one side is using it, it becomes incredibly difficult for the other side to think about winning elections without doing the same thing. This means that barring major technological changes, fake news is only going to become more prevalent. - The platform has already started a crackdown on group creation and it now blocks numbers that create too many large groups without knowing the people who are being added. This represents a problem if the policy isn’t applied to groups that already exist, because it ensures that those political parties who have already created several thousand WhatsApp groups in many states continue to maintain their competitive advantage over parties that have only recently started creating groups. - <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">none of India’s political parties is a democracy. All parties have a primary leader with a larger-than-life persona that everyone else in the party must respect and bow to.</mark> - The system is such that it tries to ensure that rebellious people don’t rise too high, and success comes only to those who respect party hierarchy. This system isn’t just a relic of old parties created decades ago; it takes hold as soon as a party is formed. - The results of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly elections, where the BJP and its allies won 325 out of 400 seats without fielding a single Muslim candidate, has renewed the party’s faith in the political merit of appealing to majoritarian sentiments. - the existence of vote banks isn’t negative per se. It’s only negative when two groups are pitted against each other for political interests. These identities themselves are often an effective means of community support for people and a key element in the distribution of resources. - Reporting on an analysis of 467 congressional races (equivalent to India’s parliamentary elections) that took place in 2012, a Wall Street Journal headline read: ‘91 per cent of the time the better-financed candidate wins.’ - According to his research into the backgrounds of candidates who have won elections to the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly, Vaishnav said, ‘Our best estimates suggest that fewer than 10 per cent of UP state legislators elected in 1984 were the subject of ongoing criminal cases. That proportion has skyrocketed to 45 per cent in the last election in 2012.’ - Contrary to popular belief, this broken system of governance strengthens the politician’s chances of winning elections because people become dependent on him for getting even basic government services. - In ancient times, land was the most important asset in the world. Politics, therefore, was the struggle to control land. And dictatorship meant that all the land was owned by a single ruler or by a small oligarch. And in the modern age, machines became more important than land. Politics became the struggle to control the machines. And dictatorship meant that too many of the machines became concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite. Now <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">data is replacing both land and machines as the most important asset. Politics becomes the struggle to control the flows of data. And dictatorship now means that too much data is being concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite.</mark> - Contrary to popular belief, a party’s ideology is mostly immaterial when it comes to governance. Ideological considerations are limited to speeches and drafting of party documents. What defines the actions of a party are the communities they must cater to in order to win elections. For instance, given the number of people who survive below a liveable wage in the country, all parties will compulsorily be socialistic in their character. The right wing and the left wing of India will both believe in welfare schemes as a means of helping the poor, and state intervention will be part of government policy in any party.