Indian Democracy in the Digital Age

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This course examines the impact of online media on India’s civil society and governance practices. On the one hand, the surge in social media use in broader South Asia seems to contribute to new forms of public hate, vigilantism, trolling, disinformation, supremacism, caste biases, digital misogyny and patriotic consumption. On the other hand, it has enabled discussion groups, hashtag activism, anti-lynching virality, digital visibility, change-oriented political action, community empowerment and the formation of networked collective sensibilities which can be mobilized for collective action. Moreover, as the use of social media in India has more than tripled in the past half decade, “influencers”, “experts” and “online activists” have become central to the conduct of electoral campaigns, political mobilizations, and social movements. The course will enable students to critically examine the various ways by which the digital is transforming the political, social and cultural landscape of the country. It aims at interrogating the role of all platforms in conducting politics in contemporary India while questioning, simultaneously, the potential weakness in generalizations and comparative biases emerging out of such analyses. We will retrace the sources of followership and funding which are behind digital campaigns, as well as related processes involving hate speech and trolling.

In a general sense, the unmediated character of social media communication contrasts with the mediated nature of distributive politics, where intermediaries, brokers and party structures are believed to be instrumental in securing votes and delivering welfare. The course will critically address this tension between ‘traditional’ grassroots modes of campaigning and ‘new’ forms of digital politics: it proposes to survey the implications this has for democratic governance. The various classes will be particularly interested in the way such entanglements create potential for private businesses and consultancies which have become significant players in the functioning of democracy as well as governance. Finally, the course will conjecture about the impact these trends have on political representation, how rumor-making as political tools result in manufacturing majorities, and the way political media extend their footprint on video-sharing platforms. More broadly, we will ask whether the digital is necessarily facilitating populist and majoritarian narratives and whether partisan cadre structures are becoming increasingly redundant in crafting and controlling the overreaching political discourse. Through these lines of interrogation, the course aims to relate the political economy of online misinformation and social media to the effects it has on the functioning of democracy. In the process, we will try to identify the inherent specificities of the use of social media for political purposes in India. In short, this course ambitions to open an informed conversation among students around the rise of a ‘profitable propaganda system’ which varies significantly from the traditional communication models of the past.

Course Validation

This course will be based on several complementary pedagogical approaches:

  1. A 15 to 20 minutes presentation that each student is expected to make starting from the second course (30%).

  2. Class attendance, participation, discussion and the digital annotation of two compulsory readings per teaching week (20%).

  3. A written essay (6,000-8,000 words). Students will choose the topic with the advice and consent of the Professor. (40%). The essay is written in two stages: a first draft that receives feedback and a final draft. Students who do not meet the deadline for the first version will lose the right to receive feedback or submit a first draft; only the final draft will be accepted.

Prerequisites & Practicalities

  • There are no prerequisites. The class will be of most immediate interest to students majoring in Government, particularly those specializing in Comparative Politics, International Politics or Political Theory.

  • The schedule is tentative and subject to change. I will introduce the tool used to annotate readings in the course of the first class.

For a quick access to the readings:

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Course Objectives

Successful students:

  1. go beyond vote-based approaches to politics to understand representation;

  2. understand how different political institutions, actors and processes shape Indian politics;

  3. comprehend the tension between the proponents of authoritarian South Asian democracies and its contestations;

  4. critically engage with ethnographic and statistical methods of inquiry;

  5. draw meaningful comparisons between democracies inside and outside South Asia

Week 01: A gentle introduction to the question of this course: how is the digital used politically in India?

Week 02: Information or disinformation?

  • Das, A. & Schroeder, R. (2021) Online disinformation in the run-up to the Indian 2019 election. Information, Communication & Society.

  • Bhat, P. & Chadha, K. (2022) The mob, the state and harassment of journalists via twitter in India. Digital Journalism, 11, 1– 21 .

  • Kumar, S. (2019) Social Media and Political Behaviour.

  • Pal, J. & Gonawela, A. (2017) Studying political communication on twitter: the case for small data. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 18, 97– 102.

  • Matamoros-Fernandez, A. & Farkas, J. (2021) Racism, hate speech, and social media: a systematic review and critique. Television & New Media, 22(2), 205– 224.

  • Neyazi, T. A. & Schroeder, R. (2021) Was the 2019 Indian election won by digital media? The Communication Review, 24 (2), 87–106.

Week 03: Influencers and politics in India

  • Akbar, S.Z., Sharma, A., Negi, H., Panda, A. & Pal, J. (2020) Anatomy of a rumour: social media and the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput. arXiv (preprint).

  • Mishra, D., Sen, R. & Pal, J. (2022) Sporting the government: Sportspersons’ engagement with causes in India and the USA on twitter. Global Policy, 00, 1–13.

  • Arya, A. et al. (2022) DISMISS: Database of Indian Social Media Influencers on Twitter.

  • Butterworth, M.L. (2013) The passion of the Tebow: sports media and heroic language in the tragic frame. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 30, 17–33.

  • Cosentino, G. (2020) Tribal politics: the disruptive effects of social media in the Global South. In: Social media and the post-truth world order: the global dynamics of disinfor- mation. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 113–133.

  • Dubois, E. & Gaffney, D. (2014) The multiple facets of influence: identifying political Influentials and opinion leaders on Twitter. American Behavioral Scientist, 58, 1260–1277.

  • Mishra, D. et al. (2021) Rihanna versus Bollywood: twitter influencers and the Indian Farmers’ protest. CoRR.

  • Panda, A. & Pal, J. (2019) Twitter in the 2019 Indian general elections: trends of use across states and parties. Economic and Political Weekly, 54(51), 1–17.

Week 04: Aadhaar and welfare

  • Rao, U. & Nair, V. (2019) Aadhaar: governing with biometrics. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42(3), 469–481.

  • Sharma, R.S. (2020) The making of Aadhaar. World’s largest identity platform. New Delhi: Rupa Publications.

  • Agrawal, R. (2018) India connected. How the smartphone is transforming the world’s largest democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Aiyar, S. (2017) Aadhaar: a biometric history of India’s 12-digit revolution. Chennai: Westland Publications.

  • Chhotray, V. & McConnell, F. (2018) Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in south Asian states and diasporas. Contemporary South Asia, 26(2), 111–126.

  • Khan, A. (2021) Beyond consent: surveillance capitalism and politics in the data state. India Review, 20(2), 158–175.

Week 05: Holiday

Week 06: Plarform economy, traditional media and political intermediation

  • Al Dahdah, M. (2022) Mobile (for) Development: When Digital Giants Take Care of Poor Women. 1st edition. Cambridge University Press.

  • Williams, P. et al. (2022) No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India. Antipode, 54 (1), 305–330.

  • Ernst, N., Blassnig, S., Engesser, S., Büchel, F. & Esser, F. (2019) Populists prefer social media over talk shows: an analysis of populist messages and stylistic elements across six countries. Social Media + Society, 5(1).

  • Kaur, R. (2015) Good times, brought to you by brand Modi. Television & New Media, 16(4), 323– 330.

  • Kreiss, D. & Mcgregor, S.C. (2018) Technology firms shape political communication: the work of Microsoft, Facebook, twitter, and Google with campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential cycle. Political Communication, 35(2), 155– 177.

Week 07: Parties, candidates, consulting agencies, advertisement and digital cam- paigning

  • Sinha, S. (2017) Mediatized populisms| fragile hegemony: social media and competitive electoral populism in India. International Journal of Communication, 11, 23.

  • Pal, J., Chandra, P., Chirumamilla, P., Kameswaran, V., Gonawela, A., Thawani, U. et al. (2017) Mediatized populisms| innuendo as outreach: @narendramodi and the use of polit- ical irony on twitter. International Journal of Communication, 11, 22.

  • Pal, J., Chandra, P. & Vydiswaran, V.V. (2016) Twitter and the rebranding of Narendra Modi. Economic and Political Weekly, 51(8), 52– 60.

  • Lilleker, D. & Jackson, N. (2013) Political campaigning, elections and the internet. Routledge.

  • Gerbaudo, P. (2019) The digital party: political organisation and online democracy. Digital barricades: interventions in digital culture and politics. London: Pluto Press.

  • Jaffrelot, C. (2013) Gujarat elections: the sub-text of Modi’s ‘hattrick’—high tech populism and the ‘neo-middle class’. Studies in Indian Politics, 1(1), 79– 95.

  • Jungherr, A. (2016) Twitter use in election campaigns: a systematic literature review. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 13(1), 72– 91.

  • Krämer, B. (2018) Populism, media, and the form of society. Communication Theory, 28(4), 444– 465.

  • Silva, M., Oliveira, L., Andreou, A., Vaz de Melo, P., Goga, O. & Benevenuto, F. (2020) Facebook Ads Monitor: An Independent Auditing System for Political Ads on Facebook.

Week 08: Which platform for which message? A comparative approach

  • Rodrigues, U. & Niemann, M. (2017) Social media as a platform for incessant political communication: a case study of Modi’s “clean India” campaign. International Journal of Communication, 11(23), 3434– 3436.

  • Sen, R. (2016) Narendra Modi’s makeover and the politics of symbolism. Journal of Asian Public Policy. 9(2), 98– 111.

  • Chadwick, A., Dennis, J. & Smith, A.P. (2018) Politics in the age of hybrid media. In: A. Bruns, G.S. Enli, E. Skogerbo, C. Christensen & A.O. Larsson (Eds.) The Routledge companion to social media and politics, 1st edition. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 7– 22.

  • Jacobs, K., Sandberg, L. & Spierings, N. (2020) Twitter and Facebook: Populists’ double-barreled gun? New Media & Society, 22(4), 611– 633.

  • Davis, B. (2013) Hashtag politics: the polyphonic revolution of Twitter. Pepperdine Journal of Communication Research, 1(1), 15– 22.

Week 09: Populism and social media, an elective affinity?

  • Chakravartty, P. & Roy, S. (2015) Mr. Modi goes to Delhi: mediated populism and the 2014 Indian elections. Television & New Media, 16(4), 311– 322.

  • Gerbaudo, P. (2018) Social media and populism: an elective affinity? Media, Culture & Society, 40(5), 745– 753.

  • Schroeder, R. (2019) Digital media and the entrenchment of right-wing populist agendas. Social Media + Society, 5(4), 8– 9.

  • Engesser, S., Ernst, N., Esser, F. & Büchel, F. (2017a) Populism and social media: how politicians spread a fragmented ideology. Information, Communication & Society, 20(8), 1109– 1126.

  • Engesser, S., Fawzi, N. & Larsson, A.O. (2017b) Populist online communication: introduc- tion to the special issue. Information, Communication & Society, 20(9), 1279– 1292.

  • Waisbord, S. & Amado, A. (2017) Populist communication by digital means: presidential twitter in Latin America. Information, Communication & Society, 20(9), 1330– 1346.

Week 10: Smart cities, datafication and the digital citizen

  • Ghosh, B. & Arora, S. (2022) Smart as (un)democratic? The making of a smart city imag- inary in Kolkata, India. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40 (1), 318–339.

  • Chakravarty, S. et al. (2022) Challenges of consultant-led planning in India’s smart cities mission. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 239980832211370.

  • Townsend, A. M. (2014) Smart cities: big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

  • Datta, A. (2015) New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5 (1), 3–22.

  • Trencher, G. (2019) Towards the smart city 2.0: Empirical evidence of using smartness as a tool for tackling social challenges. Technological Forecasting and Social Change[,Online] 117–128.

Week 11: Memes and selfies to movements? The new language of politics online

  • Kumar, S. (2015) Contagious memes, viral videos and subversive parody: The grammar of contention on the Indian web. International Communication Gazette, 77 (3), 232–247.

  • Rao, S. (2018) Making of selfie nationalism: Narendra Modi, the paradigm shift to social media governance, and crisis of democracy. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 42(2), 166– 183.

  • Mina, A. X. (2019) Memes to movements: how the world’s most viral media is changing social protest and power. Boston: Beacon Press.

  • Wiggins, B. E. (2019) The discursive power of memes in digital culture: ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality. Routledge studies in new media and cyberculture 45. New York: Routledge.

  • Shifman, L. (2014) Memes in digital culture. MIT press essential knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

  • Donovan, J. et al. (2022) Meme wars: the untold story of the online battles upending democracy in America. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Week 12: Minorities and social media: invisibilization or assertion?

  • TBA

Week 13: Digital uses and social stratification: a critical appraisal

  • Mellon, J. & Prosser, C. (2017) Twitter and Facebook are not representative of the general population: political attitudes and demographics of British social media users. Research & Politics, 4(3), 2– 6.

  • Martelli, J.-T. & Jumle, V. (2023) Populism à la Carte: The paradoxical political communication of Narendra Modi on Twitter. Global Policy, 00, 1–13.

  • O’Neil, C. (2016) Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. First edition. New York: Crown.

  • Eubanks, V. (2017) Automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. First Edition. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Week 14: Conclusion: AI as political algorithms?

  • Singh, Ranjit. 2020. “Study the Imbrication: A Methodological Maxim to Follow the Multiple Lives of Data.” Pp. 51–59 in Lives of data: essays on computational cultures from India, Theory on demand, edited by S. Mertia and R. Sundaram. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

  • Wierzchon´ , S. & Kłopotek, M. (2018) Modern algorithms of cluster analysis. Studies in big data, Vol. 34. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

  • Porter, T. M. (2020) Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. New paperback edition. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

  • Christin, A. (2020) Metrics at work: journalism and the contested meaning of algorithms. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Week 15: Remedial course if any