India's social media 'spring' masks forgotten protests

Irom Sharmila has been on hunger strike for 10 years to protest against military abuses, force-fed by tubes through her nose.But the tragedy for the worlds longest hunger strike is that she is on the wrong side of Indias digital divide.Twitter, Facebook and aggressive private TV have helped rally Indias biggest protests in decades to support civil activist Anna Hazare, a digital groundswell of a wired middle class that echoes the Arab Spring and has taken a Congress party-led government of elderly politicians by surprise.But Sharmila, who has been on a hunger strike in the northeastern Manipur state to demand an end to the armys sweeping emergency powers there, has only managed a small following, a footnote in media coverage.We also once tried to take our fight to New Delhi ... but we did not get support from the rest of the nation, Sharmila told Tehelka magazine.She must be frustrated. The Hazare phenomenon has rallied Indians from the start with social media. Hazares India Against Corruption website says it has had 13 million phone calls of support. Its Facebook page has nearly 500,000 likes.Its leaders have tweeted each step of the whirlwind crisis, whether describing their arrests in real time or negotiations with the government, outmanoeuvring Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his ministers at every step.Protest at PMs residence: 35 people detained, taken to Tughlaq Rd. PS, hundreds still there, come if you can Janlokpal, twitter user @janlokpal sent its followers in just one example of how the movement was rallying support.Cases like Sharmila expose the digital divide of Asias third largest economy and underscore how a growing urban middle class may be getting its political voice heard while millions of poor remain off the digital protest map.This is the first time digital social media has resonated with such a large number of people, said Nishant Shah, head of research at the Center for Internet and Society think-tank.But this is far more of a middle class, urban movement, than a national movement. Many people in India are excluded from it.Twitter and Facebook are barely used in many of Indias social causes, including battles over land rights that are one of Indias most pressing problems involving millions of farmers.Huge social issues in India, from caste discrimination to high food prices, from the building of dams to protests by farmers against nuclear power plants, have failed to create the kind of digital mobilization that Hazare enjoys.