4 - ‘Computer Boys’ and ‘Big Data’ in the Indian National Congress

Summary

In August 1955, Isaac Asimov published his well-known short story ‘Franchise’ in If: Worlds of Science Fiction magazine. ‘Franchise’ depicts a futuristic US that has earned the distinction of being the world's first ‘electronic democracy’ because a supercomputer named Multivac has displaced mass franchise as the technique of electing the American president. During every election cycle, Multivac selects a single voter who is adjudged to be the most ‘representative’ citizen and then subjects them to hours of rigorous questioning to learn about the mood and preferences of the wider electorate. While Multivac's inception was driven by the hope that it would ‘end partisan politics’ and reduce ‘voter's money [being] wasted on campaigns’, we are told that by the election year of 2008, there was ‘more campaigning than ever’ before. In the story, the mantle of ‘Voter of the Year’ is conferred on a man named Norman Muller, a humble shopkeeper from the state of Indiana. Asimov's choice to foreground the figure of the diffident Muller was arguably strategic. Although voting may have disappeared in this electronic democracy, Asimov did not seem to envisage that technological innovations would result in either a pure technocracy led by scientists or a model of sortition led by a computerised lottery. Ordinary Joes like Muller had a role to play—they were, after all, the crucial repositories of ‘data’ for Multivac. Thus, this was a world where electoral verdicts were still predicated on collective public opinion. However, they were mediated by the science of probability distributions, the logic of sampling and the sentience of computers that could parse large tranches of data and deconstruct subjective human emotions. In other words, for Asimov, technology would not entirely obviate political citizenship, but certainly truncate its role.

Although the year 1984 carries an obvious Orwellian resonance, for members of the INC, this was the year when Asimov's foresight seemed to be vindicated over George Orwell’s. Rajiv Gandhi, a fourth-generation scion of the Nehru–Gandhi family, was busy rolling out an ambitious programme where he envisaged that political decision-making in the party would be managed through large-scale data collection and computerised analysis.