Let India 2.0 rise from the ashes of Bombay

Elliot Wilson says that an energetic form of political activism — principally on the internet — is needed in India and there are encouraging signs on Facebook, MySpace and other sites

If there is any good to come out of November’s bloody terror attacks in Bombay, it can be found not on the city’s angry streets, nor in the Lok Sabha, New Delhi’s lethargic lower house, but in a more nebulous place, dismissed by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain but embraced by US President-elect Barack Obama: the internet.

The Bombay bombings have galvanised urban professionals — traditionally the least-motivated bloc of Indian voters — forcing them to come out of the closet and admit to their political apathy just in time for watershed parliamentary elections in the spring.

Millions of city-dwellers are turning to the web, and in particular the interconnected ‘social networking’ sites — Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and so on. In doing so they are asking themselves and the politicians purporting to represent them in parliament some uncomfortable questions. What does democracy mean to them? Does India’s bloated bureaucracy give them the quality of universal suffrage they want and need? And what can they themselves do, on a daily basis, to make things better? Perhaps most surprisingly, in a country long on debaters and short on deciders, some people are actually putting words into action.

Take Anand Sivakumaran, a Bombay-born Bollywood scriptwriter currently producing and directing his first feature film. His Facebook group, ‘I am clean’, founded in the days after the attack, is a call to arms for his apathetic generation: a group happy first to dodge taxes or bribe cops, and only then to complain about the lack of social infrastructure and prevalence of institutional corruption.