Stéphanie Tawa Lama is a researcher at CSH and Director (political science – Centre for South Asian Studies, CNRS-EHESS Paris), will be participating in an online talk on “AAP, Apps and WhatApp: Participation in the low tech and high-tech practices of the Aam Aadmi Party”organised by the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities in IIIT-Delhi, on Wednesday, 24 November 2021 at 4:00 PM.

Google Meet link: meet.google.com/xxc-fstm-pvy

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Abstract: Participation – the need to govern with the people – was a major theme of the Aam Aadmi Party’s discourse when this party was created in 2012. Eight years and three elections later, how has this keyword been interpreted? What practices has it translated into? And what has been the role of digital technologies in such practices?
This paper situates the AAP’s discourse on participation with regard to the party’s genesis and identifies the main meanings attached to this word. It describes the three main types of participatory experiments implemented (however briefly in some cases) by the AAP government in Delhi, drawing a distinction between the low-tech and high-tech practices at work in each case. Finally, it shows that participation has undergone a high-tech turn from 2019 onwards, and reflects on what such evolution does to participation, and what it says about the place of participation in the party/government.