Despite the hullabaloo about an ‘Obama’ style campaign, the Kerala Assembly Election-2011 is not making waves in cyber space unlike the 2006 contest.
Tweets about candidate selection, the drama over the Kerala chief minister, Mr V.S. Achuthanandan’s candidature, and the Kerala Congress (B) leader, Mr R. Balakrishna Pillai’s decision to contest election from jail are doing its rounds in social networking sites.
However, unlike in 2006, there are no coordinated efforts to initiate any serious discussions or responses.
In 2006, pro-Achuthanandan discussions were initiated and moderated by loyalists of the Marxist veteran with the objective of gathering global Malayali support for him. Discussion forums with left leanings are still initiating debates. But most of these debates lack the sharpness and continuity of the previous polls. For instance, www.
comradevs.com, a website dedicated for the promotion of Mr Achuthanandan could generate more than 6 lakh hits a day in 2006.
However, the well wishers of Mr Achuthanandan are yet to add fresh content in that site in this poll.
Mr Achuthanandan’s close aide and former IT adviser, Mr Joseph C. Mathew, told this newspaper that
the IT savvy followers of the veteran communist leader could not finalise an action plan for cyber campaign this time.
“We had plans to expose the UDF leaders’ allegations against the Chief Minister but elections were declared well ahead of our expectations,” he said. “We were really left short of time to work on an action plan’’, he said.
The LDF and UDF have hosted election websites. But they are yet to generate any impressive response from netizens.