Article
As India’s staggered 2009 general election got under way, the BBC reported on how political parties, campaigning to reach a country where nearly half the population is under 25 but the leading prime ministerial candidates were both over 70, increasingly turned to text messages, social networking sites and online campaign videos alongside traditional door-to-door canvassing. With only around 45 million internet users compared with over 370 million mobile subscribers, parties recognised that no campaign could reach most Indian voters without a mobile strategy, while portals from Yahoo! and Google let young, urban voters build their own manifestos and debate issues online in a country that lacked the US tradition of televised candidate debates.