How minutely can you profile a voter? Alexander Nix, former CEO of the now infamous Cambridge Analytica, tried to answer the question when he boasted, just before the 2016 American presidential election, that his company had “somewhere close to 4 or 5,000 data points on every adult in the United States”. The CA scandal has brought microprofiling of voters into the centrestage of political discourse, but Indian elections have always seen some amount of profiling of its now 850 million electorate.They may not have been submitted to psychographic profiling on the basis of the ads they clicked and the movies they watched but every election, they are broadly but painstakingly divided on the basis of gender, age, caste, sect, religion and party affiliation.Millions of these voters have determined election results — from panchayat to Parliament. It would be presumptuous to hand it over to a handful of elite data miners and number crunchers.For a landslide win in India, political parties still can’t rely on sophisticated or ridiculously detailed psychological profiling of voters, as the controversial British data analytics firm CA allegedly did for Donald Trump’s campaign in the US and the Brexit in the UK, among others. While illegal hoovering of personal data is worrying and needs to be brought under scrutiny, targeted messaging has always been part of election ecosystem. The voter has never existed in an information vacuum.“If social media data is considered so important, why do political parties, for example in Tamil Nadu, still use one agent for every 50 voters?” asks N Gopalaswami, who was chief election commissioner in 2006-09. “Are Indian voters so gullible that one social media or phone message will change their political choice?” As the former head of Indian election watchdog says, profiling of voters in certain formats has been in practice for decades; what has changed are the means to reach out to them.Show Your ProfilePolitical parties have traditionally undertaken constituency-wise and even booth-wise caste and religious profiling and targeting of voters. Also, wooing community or religious leaders to swing votes of their followers has been a time-tested campaign practice. Further, political parties have always attempted to identify fence-sitters and spot households and neighbourhoods that can be lured by incentives, including alcohol and cash. Not all of these means deployed during elections are legal, but the larger takeaway is that Indian political parties have experimented with highly targeted campaigns even before Cambridge Analytica or homegrown Prashant Kishor surfaced as game-changers.Traditional methods of electioneering are still in practice. Even so, the spread of social media — Facebook has the largest number of users in India, 25 crore — and the use of smartphones and high-speed 4G network have made the country an attractive destination for ideology-neutral election strategists as well as canny digital manipulators.“The spread of smartphones and 4G to the remotest villages has given opportunities to digital manipulators to influence unsophisticated and unsuspecting voters. That’s where the danger to democracy lies,” says Prodyut Bora, founder head of BJP’s IT cell (2007-09), who quit the national party in 2015 to start his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The LDP unsuccessfully contested in 14 assembly seats in the 2016 Assam poll. “When the BJP started using social media in 2007, it was seen more as a tool that would democratise media. Today, social media is all about trolling and profiling of users,” Bora adds.Kishor’s team has had mixed results: while he succeeded in 2014 general election, which was swept by the BJP, and in assembly polls in Bihar (where the JD(U)-RJD-Congress Mahagathbandhan won in 2015), Gujarat (won by BJP) and Punjab (where Kishor worked for the Congress that won), he failed miserably in swinging Uttar Pradesh for the Congress. For new-age election strategists like him, use of social media has only been a small part of the whole game.What he does is make intelligent use of data and technology to understand the target audience and increase the efficiency of already available election campaign methods.Whether it’s the use of 3D holograms for Narendra Modi in 2014 — a mix of technology and traditional campaign methods — or asking the people of Bihar to give a missed call in 2015 — to get a voter’s accurate profile, useful for subsequent customised messaging — Kishor’s means are more tech-driven and less social media-anchored. His methods also included installing GPS in campaign vehicles to ensure that they moved to scheduled locations well in time.Real-time data collection from each booth on election day is the new normal; it helps a political party intervene if it finds some anomaly in voter turnout in a particular locality.But data does not decide elections. If smart election campaign could swing polls, what explains Kishor’s failure in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh election where his client Congress lost despite having a pre-poll alliance with the Samajwadi Party? Or, how could the Trinamool Congress coast to a win in the 2016 assembly poll in West Bengal despite not roping in any tech-driven campaign machinery or having a robust social media presence, unlike the BJP? No political party can ignore technology or social media platforms, but there’s little to prove that Cambridge Analytica-type of super microprofiling of voters and psychographics will work in the Indian context.Both the BJP and the Congress have accused each other of hiring the services of the tainted firm and its parent company SCL Group but both parties have denied it. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, in a testimony to British lawmakers, said earlier this week that he “believes” the Congress was the company’s client in India. Then, a video which was part of a BBC documentary broadcast last year, has emerged, showing a Congress poster in the office of its then CEO.The question is, which Congress victory — except in Punjab, there has been none, of late — can be attributed to Cambridge Analytica’s microprofiling? Even if microprofiling becomes rampant in the country, can the Election Commission of India, which reluctantly joined social media in 2015-16, tackle it? And, should it? Gopalaswamy asks: “Except on expenditure, why should the Election Commission even bother if political parties use any tool, including Facebook, Twitter, to influence voters?” Professor P Vigneswara Ilavarasan of the department of management studies in IIT-Delhi, who has done research on social media and its business applications, says, “From a moral stand point, microprofiling of customers is wrong. But from a business point of view, the line is blurred. All private companies have done profiling, in some form. Cambridge Analytica is just one story that came out. Almost all internet firms mine user data. There are no free lunches.”

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