Rajesh Jain

Digital Action

To bring about change, UVI will need to make the leap from attracting between 10% to 30% of the voters. As we have seen, the NANVs (Non Aligned and Non Voters) make up about two-thirds of the Indian electorate. So, around half of them will need to come together and vote as one to bring about real change in India’s political landscape. To coordinate the actions of such large numbers is impossible even for political parties. This is where the ideas of swarm intelligence, self-organising systems and emergence come into play. Rather than trying to build a top-down system which can be immobilised by targeting the leaders, what is needed is a bottom-up decentralised system – coordinated via digital tools.

The organising unit for UVI has to begin at the booth level. A polling booth consists of about 1000 voters – about 250 families. A UVI cell will be needed in every booth with a single objective: can the cell attract a third of the voters (families) who agree to vote and vote as one on election day? Little of no action is needed in the physical world except the act of voting. Everything else can be done digitally – right from signing up members to running primaries to campaigning. A UVI member with a smartphone is the granular unit from which the larger swarm can be constructed. India’s future – our children’s future – is truly in our hands.

Today, there are many who feel helpless – disillusioned with the existing political parties and not finding alternatives among the available options. This is the ideal scenario for a new startup – but the solution is not creating a new political party which over time becomes just like the established entities. What is needed is a new approach to politics. Robinhood and Reddit brought in a new class of investors to the US markets. UVI and its digital platform need to do a similar transformation in India – attract those who are not passionate about politics but have a desire for change. The answer lies in each constituency selecting its candidate via primaries – thus laying the foundation for a Swatantra Lok Sabha.

With a growing number of economic policies taking India back to the dark days of 1960s and 1970s, India needs a “Ghar Lao Lakshmi” movement. A digital platform like UVI can help the silent and disenchanted majority come together to coordinate their actions to overturn the power structure in India that has made serfs of its citizens. Street protests are fine but what’s needed is electoral power. Votes of the selectorate keep the incumbent parties in power. It is time for the independents to rise to complete the unfinished freedom movement of 1857 and 1947 so that when we look back a decade later, we can say, “Ghar Aayi Lakshmi.”

Decentralised Systems

India’s political parties are examples of extreme centralisation. The members of the national and regional parties practice absolute obedience to a single leader (or in some cases, a family). Every important decision flows from the top. The masses who vote for these parties have no say in even choosing their own candidate. As such, power gets sucked from the people to the party HQ and the isolated, supreme leadership.

Creating yet another centralised system is not the solution to taking on the established political parties. Disruption happens when a new way of doing things is created. Faster mainframes did not transform computing, the desktop PC did. Today, we have more computing power in our smartphones than the most powerful of computers 50 years ago. And there are billions of such devices, not a handful.

India’s political parties and their leaders will not bring about change. If anything, they will concentrate even more power in their hands and centralise decision-making to greater levels. We are seeing this play out with every government in India. Centralisation increases with every election. The previous leader’s playbook becomes the starting point for the next. No change can be expected from such a system.

What is needed is the opposite of a centralised system. Once upon a time, the internet was catalogued by Yahoo’s editors. Yahoo did not lose out to a better editorial team; it lost out to a search engine which leveraged the information embedded in links in pages created by millions of people. Google’s decentralised decisions by algorithms won over the centralised directories of the early Internet.

From Wikipedia:

A centralised system is one in which a central controller exercises control over the lower-level components of the system directly or through the use of a power hierarchy (such as instructing a middle level component to instruct a lower level component). The complex behaviour exhibited by this system is thus the result of the central controller’s “control” over lower level components in the system, including the active supervision of the lower level components.

A decentralised system, on the other hand, is one in which complex behaviour emerges through the work of lower level components operating on local information, not the instructions of any commanding influence. This form of control is known as distributed control, or control in which each component of the system is equally responsible for contributing to the global, complex behaviour by acting on local information in the appropriate manner.

Indian politics needs a decentralised system as its next innovation. Power needs to flow back to the people and be distributed through the chain with the lowest possible unit making it relevant. Decentralised systems + Swarm intelligence + self-organising + co-ordination + digital. This is the magic and promise of UVI which can change India’s politics and our futures.

India’s Ruling Elite

India’s political and governing elite have prevented Indians from becoming prosperous. Ananth Nageswaran wrote recently in Mint: “Over the decades, Indian bureaucracy—Union, states and local—has honed its skills in tying the rest of the country down in non-productive endeavours into a fine art that very few countries can match. The operating principle in view is that the government does not trust citizens to do the right thing, forcing citizens to reciprocate that faith with their own creativity. Some give up. Some emigrate. Some co-opt the system. Many struggle throughout their lives to deal with the government machinery. It does not end even after their sojourn on earth ends. India’s regulatory, compliance and inspection frameworks are similar to an auto-immune disease that makes the human body’s defence system turn on the body instead of protecting it.”

The India taking shape in front of our eyes is one in which the very institutions that should safeguard the rights of the people are doing exactly the opposite. Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote recently:

The language of order, and the pieties of the flag in which it is wrapped by the state and the media, is not about order at all. The language of order is partisan to the hilt. It is weaponised to crush dissent. It is used to empower repression. It is used to desecrate the spirit of constitutional values. But it gives even the supposedly most liberal amongst us the perfect pretext to rally behind the government once again. It gives a pretext to appease our consciences that we can ignore the systematic repression of civil liberties, the runaway crony capitalism, and the frightening communalism of the state, the criminalising of dissent, the desecration of federalism and the collapse of institutions. It allows us to ignore the fact that the most influential and powerful sections of society from legal professionals to academics and media, from owners of capital to bureaucracy, have connived in creating the conditions of disorder, by closing off legitimate channels of democratic deliberation, and actively supporting authoritarianism and communalism.

As I have written previously, India’s leaders and their decisions over the decades have doomed the people. Like the British, India’s leaders continue to divide and rule to craft their selectorate to stay in power. The courts, police and media become puppets of those in power. For people to co-ordinate their action was very difficult – so far. What GameStop and other protest movements in an eventful January are now demonstrating is that it can be done. What is needed is a platform like UVI to enable a coordinated collective to come together to break the centralised control a few politicians at the top have over an entire nation. The game is the same, the rules are the same; it’s time for a different strategy.

The Trends

Aswath Damodaran, comparing the events to the storming of the Bastille, wrote about the broader trends at play:

1. A loss of faith in experts (economic, scientific, financial, government): During the 20th century, advances in education, and increasing specialization created expert classes in almost every aspect of human activity, from science to government to finance/economics. For the most part, we assumed that their superior knowledge and experience equipped them to take the right actions, and with our limited access to information, we often were kept in the dark, when they were wrong. That pact has been shattered by a combination of arrogance on the part of experts and catastrophic policy failures, with the 2008 banking crisis acting as a wake up call. In the years since, we have seen this loss of faith play out in economics, politics and even health, with expert opinion being cast aside, ignored or ridiculed.

2. An unquestioning worship of crowd wisdom, combined with an empowering of crowds: In conjunction, we have also seen the rise of big data and the elevation of “crowd” judgments over expert opinions, and it shows up in our life choices. We pick the restaurants we eat at, based on Yelp reviews, the movies we watch on Rotten Tomatoes and the items we buy on customer reviews. Social media has made it easier to get crowd input (online), and precipitate crowd actions.

3. A conversion of disagreements in every arena into the personal and the political: While we can continue to debate the reasons, it remains inarguable that public discourse has coarsened, with the almost every debate, no matter in what realm, becoming personal and political.

Some of the themes were echoed in an essay by Raghu SJ (Anticipating the Unintended) discussing “four trends now deeply embedded in our culture and politics seem to have marked their arrival in the markets with this story”:

1. Radically Networked Societies (RNS) meet Capital Markets: Nitin Pai and Pranay define a radically networked society as a web of hyper-connected individuals, possessing an identity (imagined or real), and motivated by a common immediate cause. The emergence of RNS aided by cellphones, cheap data connectivity and social media platforms is a phenomenon for the hierarchical state to contend. The immediate cause that motivates an RNS could be irrational but before the state or the established institutions can even put their shoes on, the RNS might have gone around the world twice with their message

2. Knocking the experts off their pedestal: The experts are all sold out. They have an agenda and they won’t tell you the truth. That’s the message that’s mainstream now in politics and culture. This is what drives the anti-vaxxers, climate science deniers, trade protectionists and other conspiracy theories going around. Now add the Wall Street experts to this list.

3. The crowd is right: What are people like you buying, watching, eating or wearing? So many people can’t be wrong. If I can watch and enjoy something based on what others are watching, I can buy a stock the same way. Zero brokerage platforms like Robinhood and Public have built their business models around this. Gamify the stock markets. Make it addictive. The millennials seeking thrill sitting at home during the pandemic have a new destination.

4. It is personal: Hyper-personalisation, the market of one, call it by any name. You are now invested deeply in your belief and your platform. It is your identity. The echo chamber you inhabit keeps reinforcing this belief.

Reading all this got me thinking: how can India’s forgotten and ignored masses swarm together, organise and co-ordinate their actions using a digital platform, and take on and bring down the political parties to make possible the political change that is needed for the economic transformation that will bring Lakshmi into the home of every Indian?