The dangers of digital democracy
India's transition to democracy has a long history. Even before the coming of the European powers to India, there were various instances in history when the people exercised power directly.
But the general elections of independent India in 1951 is the first milestone towards the building of this democracy, which has been shaped by people's power, wherein people reposed their trust in Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajendra Prasad.
Post-Second World War was a time when the birth of a number of new nation states and democracies took place. The formation of nation states and their nature have been much debated by modern philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Bentham and others on the results and products of various people’s revolutions (French and Russian) in history.
There was a continued effort from 18th century to 19 century to develop the idea of democracy so that the ultimate power of governance could be kept in the hands of people.
Now after the coming of social media and the new age of internet communication, the idea of democracy has come under serious threat. On the basis of latest technological developments and its participation and legitimisation by government appendages, the capitalist mode of production and power is overtaking democracy from people's hand to personnel’s hand.
There is no doubt that the advent of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter has helped us a lot on various fronts of life, but in the age of globalisation and event management, these things are becoming the weapons through which the consent of society are being manipulated or restructured.
The processes of globalisation have affected the world in the true sense of market-oriented society wherein the whole world is nothing, but a place of business. In this new economy, money is controlled neither by the government nor the people, but the capitalists. And this become a ground for the shift in the nature of democracy. Earlier, democracy was known to be representative, where an elected member was supposed to represent people of the respective areas. However, with globalisation and enhancement of communication technologies democracy has become participatory where each and every voice is audible (Twitter, Facebook) and this is the goodness about this technological evolution.
Notwithstanding that one positive aspect of this virtual participatory form of democracy, there are some serious threats which can be called the technical pathogens. It means they will eat up the very source from where they evolved. For example, the voice which is audible on the virtual space have no authenticity - it could be real or fake, but what will happen when this voice tries to muzzle the actual voice, or if it associates its own interest to make it appear like the people's voice.
We can also take the example of Arab Spring, which was also a result of democratic participation of people in digital form, but now the same boon has become a curse.
India is world's largest democracy and it is always going through a continuous chain of elections - municipal, Assembly or general, just like the saying goes that democracy is a continues process. Technology is slowly raising its ugly head in the Indian democracy too.
For example, the kind of legitimacy that has been given to private players like Facebook and Twitter by the present NDA government is unprecedented. And in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, it has come to the fore how private information of more than 50 million Facebook users have been harvested for election campaigns by various nations and political parties.
Indian Facebook users are also suspected to be a victim of the data breach. That mainstream political parties are going more and more digital in their election management instead of going directly to the people, also says a lot about the dangers, not to mention the vulnerability of the EVM machines.
Voters can no longer be sure if their mandate has been manipulated or not. They can no longer be sure that technological intervention in the process of election and democracy is safe.
But one thing is sure politics in the digital age has turned democracy upside down.