Wrong question

PM's app should not be a tool for BJP's election efforts

The structure of politics in a conventional democracy, with agenda-driven political parties competing for the popular vote often, makes it difficult for politicians to understand the distinction between the domains of party imperatives such as election campaigning and the official governance process. However, prime ministers are expected to understand this fine differentiation better than the rank and file. Over the past few years, however, Narendra Modi has demonstrated a hazy notion of what constitutes the sphere of public governance as distinct from his party’s campaign platform. The latest example of this is the detailed online survey launched on the prime minister’s app, popularly known as the NaMo app, seeking views from the Indian public on his government’s performance over the past four years. As a concept, there is nothing wrong in an online survey that solicits opinion from the people, and in a country as vast and varied as India, it is an enlightened way of reaching out to the people. Indeed, it shows that the government of the day is responsive. 

The problem with the survey, however, is that it appears clearly slanted towards the Bharatiya Janata Party’s key agenda ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and also involves a degree of data mining that has nothing to do with public policy concerns. Questions about how people rate the rural electrification programme, Swachh Bharat and road construction would have been unexceptionable in themselves if the app was seeking people’s views on how to improve these initiatives. Instead, the survey has included several pointed comparative queries about the speed of governance, optimism about the future and so on. Further down there are some dead giveaways. One is a multiple-choice question about the respondent’s prime consideration when voting. Another rather more obvious one asks whether the respondent would be interested in doing voluntary work for the BJP in the 2019 elections, an inescapable example of data mining to trap the unwary.  

Had the prime minister launched this survey on his party’s app, which is maintained by the party’s own elaborate IT establishment, the survey and its tenor would not have been open to question. To do so on an app that is maintained by the government’s IT set-up and is, therefore, financed by the taxpayer’s dime surely raises issues of propriety. To be sure, this is not the first time that the app has been leveraged for narrow purposes. A few months ago, some 1,300,000 cadets of the National Cadet Corp (NCC) were asked to download the NaMo app on their smartphones ahead of a scheduled meeting with the prime minister. The Twitter world’s condemnation of this blatant attempt at propaganda exploded just as the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and, in an unrelated development, it became clear that the prime ministerial app was harvesting user data without consent. It is ironic that the current dispensation missed the ethical infringement. For a regime that thrives on whataboutery concerning the opposition Congress party, it is surprising that it is following some of its predecessors’ worst practices. This latest episode, for instance, reminds one of the time when Rajiv Gandhi, then the prime minister, held a Congress Working Committee meeting in South Block. Justifiably, he was roundly criticised; the boot is on the other foot now.

Clarification

The editorial commenting on the propriety of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official app being used for party and electoral purposes stated that the app is maintained by the government’s information technology set-up. In fact, the app, which is promoted as “The Official App of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”, was developed and is maintained by the Bharatiya Janata Party.