Alert and connected, young Muslims in Bihar find Facebook is a smart way to affect votes

Kishanganj (Bihar): It was 10:45 in the morning when we left the hotel to visit the villages of Kochadhaman assembly constituency. The electoral battle here is between JD(U)’s Mujahid Alam Akhtarul Iman of All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM), which is testing the electoral waters in Bihar. But this story is not about the contestants or the parties they represent.

It’s about how the younger generation of Muslims have taken to mobile telephony with gusto and making technology play a part in politics.

While crossing Paschim Pali Chowk, my local guide Jawed Alam (25) suddenly told me, “Dekhiye, Katju kitna achcha baat bola hai (See, how good a statement Katju – former Supreme Court judge- has made).” He was showing a Hindi news clip shared on Facebook.

I took his smart phone and saw the headline of the news piece. It read: ‘‘Main gau maans khata hun, kaun rok sakta hai mujhe? (I eat beef, who can stop me?). I asked the young boy what is wrong in respecting someone’s religious sentiments. His outright reply was, “How can the government decide our food habit?”

Following a brief discussion on the issue, he showed me another post saying, “Humne Facebook par ek survey kiya jismen pucha ki ‘aap kisko #Kochadhaman se apna vote denge – #AIMMIM ya #JD(U)? Zaroor apna vote #comment men likhkar kahen’ (I have carried out a survey on Facebook in which I asked people ‘whom you will vote for from Kochadhaman – AIMMIM or JD(U)? Do send your response through comments.).”

Asked what and how many replies he got, Alam, who run a fertiliser shop in his village, Mandho, showed the post which had fetched 211 likes and 244 comments at that time. “Out of the 244 comments so far, JD(U) did not get even 44 votes in its favour,” he told me with smile on his face.

The use of hash tags in the post and a photoshopped image with Kaun (who) written in bold with larger fonts at the top of the photo with two arrows pointing downwards towards file photos of Akhtarul Iman speaking in Bihar assembly and Mujahid Alam addressing a gathering were a revelation. Technology surely had made a big inroad into this otherwise underdeveloped region and the young have been smart enough to make good use of it.

We stopped to have water and tea at a roadside hotel. As he was offering us chairs, the cell phone of the young man at the hotel, Iftekhar, rang. After he finished his brief conversation with the caller in his local language, perhaps Surjapuri, I enquired about his handset and how he uses it. He said he browses Facebook and Google with the help of 2G internet packs, not costly ones. He knew well about UC Browser. He also knew about Twitter, but never used that.

“I use internet to operate Facebook which connects me to my friends living in cities to earn livelihood. I do video chat with them through imo (a message and video chat application),” he said.

He and others have created several groups on WhatsApp and Facebook to garner support in favour of their candidates. “We have created separate groups of our villages to highlight the merits of the candidate we support and remove all other misunderstandings. Each group has 100-150 members who raise several questions and we answer them. On Facebook, we highlight the work our candidate has done for the welfare of people. Time to time, we conduct surveys through our posts to find out the increase in popularity of our leader. It is proving to be a good tool to convince people, especially youth. So far, we are successful in our strategy,” said the 19-year-old boy who has a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Marwari College.

Asked did he use internet available on his mobile phone for studies, he replied “Not really.”

Mohammad Shahnawaz likes firebrand Owaisi brothers (Lok Sabha MP Asaduddin Owaisi and his younger brother and Akbaruddin Owaisi) and listens to their speeches on YouTube. He never fails to make small clippings of the public rallies of their “representatives” to circulate it on WhatsApp and share them among his Facebook groups. “We observe every comment carefully and identify those voters who have reservations. If they are voters of our constituency, we arrange their cell phone number and personally call them to convince him,” he added.

During this discussion, another young boy, who was patiently listening to our conversation, quietly intervened and showed me some YouTube videos he had downloaded in which the then RJD MLA Iman is seen raising the educational, social and economical backwardness of the Muslim community in the assembly.

“See, how concerned he is for our future,” said the boy adding that “When people raise questions on the work our former legislature had done for the area, we show them these videos”. Since his hobbies include watching movies, he exhausts his data packs on film trailers.

Manzar (25) is a class 5 drop out and works as a contractor in Gurgaon. He is in the village to caste his vote. For him the internet is just a medium to connect with people on WhatsApp. Neither of them have computers at home or even know about broadband.

Technology has made the young in the region aware of developments worldwide and connect over issues - for example, all of them know about ISIS but have no fascination for it. This sets him apart from the older generation in the community. Technology has touched their lives but not penetrated deep enough to make radical changes in the areas such as education.

We say good bye and move on.