Politics is a dirty business and mudslinging has always been part and parcel of this trade, with more and more people getting online, it was only time before the whole mudslinging affair came online as well, as it been the case with the American Presidential Elections.

However it did came as a bit of surprise to me, when I heard BJP (one of India’s leading political party) has launched KnowPratibhaPatil.com.

For those who don’t know about Indian politics, here is some background:

Pratibha Patil is the Presidential nominee of India National Congress, who is currently in majority in both houses of the parliament and is the arch rival of BJP. BJP as expected from an opposition party chose not to support Congress’s Presidential Nominee and has in turn nominated Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.

Now back to the topic, KnowPratibhaPatil.com is a website through which BJP hopes to raise popular sentiment against Pratibha Patil, by telling us the “truth”. Which is fine by me since I am not a big fan of either parties.

However what is interesting is the fact that BJP believes their own candidate doesn’t needs a website to promote himself. Now that is kind of true as well, considering Indian Presidential Election is an indirect election i.e. people choose representatives for the upper and lower houses of the parliament who in turn elect the president. So the presidential election isn’t actually democratic in the true sense and people’s sentiments don’t really count.

Now getting back to KnowPratibhaPatil.com, from a webmaster point of view I am kind of disappointed with it at some fronts and while there are other parts that have managed to some what impress me, so I am going to list out a few plus and minus points of KnowPratibhaPatil.com.

Plus points:

1. Content: There is a lot of content on the site, not only in text format, but also in images and video clippings. Some thing that is sure to captivate the audience and keep them glued to the site for a while.

2. Targeted towards the youth: Even though the site is clearly political in nature, there is an attempt to lighten the mood of the site by having a dedicated section for cartoons (political of course). Some thing I am sure a lot of people like me would like and appreciate, though there is certainly room for more improvement and more cartoons. Then there are links to some interesting videos as well, including one posted on Youtube.

3. Promoting Bloggers with the same cause: KnowPratibhaPatil.com has site wide text links to six different blog posts such as this one from Atlantean Thoughts; these will surely add spice to the whole affair and should help get more attention from other bloggers and political commentators. Though they could have asked for a link back from these bloggers, since that would have driven some more traffic to the site.

Minus Points:

1. Too little to late: The site only came online on the 10th of July and the presidential elections will be held on the 19th of July, which means unless BJP is able to drive tons of traffic to this site by using advertisements and press releases, the whole affair may prove futile. With the BJP conceding that the site will be taken down after the presidential elections, it might just be a drop in the ocean and we won’t get to see how well they could have exploited the internet to their advantage.

2. Designs a bit dull: I know sites like these have to sober, but they could have spiced it up a little.

3. Bad SEO: Even though the pages are light and there are keyword and descriptions tags being used on the site, strangely the description Meta tag has been left completely empty! Then there is use of h2 tag but there is no sign of h1 tag!

4. Poll cannot be found: Online poll was some thing I was looking forward to, even though I never vote offline, but sadly I just got an error message “Poll ID 0 does not exist”, come on guys, you can do better then that.

5. Lack of discussion forum: I know it could be big headache, but giving people ability to comment on the topic or discuss them in a forum would have surely won them some more fans and driven a lot more traffic. But I guess they decided to play a cautious game with the site.

All in all I feel it was a good move on the part of BJP and I would have loved to see Congress retaliate, but I guess this isn’t going to happen now and I would probably have to wait till the general election to see how political parties use the internet to go one up on each other.

So till then, keep watching this space…