Anyone who emails climate solutions engineer Vivek Gilani gets an out-of-office notice. It informs you that Gilani, 47, hasn’t fled the heat for cooler climes. He’s paused all else for three months to work full-time on his Informed Voter Project, an initiative he launched four general elections ago and one that has since seen many iterations.
His message arrives in your inbox “with the hope that this becomes a normal thing to do — for anyone who considers our democracy a privilege that was earned through immense struggle and that needs unrelenting vigilance, that this becomes a regular ‘vacation responder’ that springs like a hope-regenerating fountain from all our emails before elections”. He’s poetic that way, even though, as Joseph Vessaokar, his trumpet teacher in Bandra informs him, he is tone deaf. “I never thought I had a musical bone in my body and he has confirmed I don’t,” Gilani says.
The out-of-office note is partly responsible for bringing together, for the first time, his life as the founder of cBalance, his firm that helps businesses become sustainable, and his long-standing passion for civic activism. A policy researcher from a non-profit with whom he previously worked on air pollution and the head of sustainability at one of cBalance’s largest corporate clients signed on as volunteers.
Registered as a trust in Mumbai, the Informed Voter Project has five city chapters (if you’re in cities that vote tomorrow, head to hyderabadvotes.org and punevotes.org) and tracks the performance of elected representatives against promises they made before they were voted in. It builds a permanent record of their actions, red-flagging the severity of the criminal cases against them and the growth in their personal wealth. “The personal wealth of incumbents, adjusted for inflation, has grown 250% in five years for NDA candidates and 50% for INDIA. The median assets owned by an ordinary Indian in this time have grown 0.7%,” he says. This election, Informed Voter analysed 98 promises of the government across seven key ministries.
Beginnings of accountability
Gilani’s work first got attention in 2008, after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. He had already been working on the project for four years, archiving news about Indian elected representatives, even from the U.S., where he studied environmental engineering. He lived in Harlem for four years, soaking in the cultural heft of the neighbourhood and the alienation of the area’s citizens.
After the terrorist attacks, Mumbaikars were eager to reinvent themselves and someone discovered Gilani’s website. “Suddenly everyone in Mumbai wanted to do something about accountability,” he says. “People were ridden with guilt. All the coffee shops were filled with people trying to work for change.”
Rich Mumbaikars saw Gilani as an ‘entrepreneur’ and gave him money to build a five-year archive of candidates seeking to be elected in the 2009 election. Informed Voter worked with bigger civic organisations such as Bengaluru-based Janaagraha and Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms, but in a year-and-a-half, ‘investors’ had lost patience. “Questions about growth, return on investment all started kicking in,” Gilani says. “They thought accountability meant access. And they were mystified that the issues were not all about the economy and potholes but about justice and employment. ‘These are not the issues of this area,’ they said.”
By 2010, Gilani was self-funding his project, pouring his savings into Informed Voter. In addition to professionals who volunteer, his team members include a law student, a former domestic worker, and someone who works as an office odd-jobs man for a builder and analyses hate speech in his free time.
Gilani began engaging with the idea of accountability as a teenager after a civic group visited his school. “I saw that environmental degradation, social exploitation and the undermining of democracy all have the same root causes,” he says. As a climate activist, he quickly realised that “a small population of Indians was hiding behind the footprint of a billion Indians who have no footprint, conflating Indianness with being environmentally-friendly” — and then being sanctimonious about the carbon footprint of western nations.
Thoughts on train journeys
In those days, Gilani says, he was a Gandhian who found western civilisation “abhorrent”. Going abroad to study had never occurred to him until his mother died in a car crash on the eve of his IIT entrance exam. This loss exacerbated his anti-car politics, adding a personal dimension to his anger against the systemic crisis of automobile emissions and the capture of public space by cars. Gilani’s preferred mode of transport is cycle or train and some years, he makes up to 30 long-distance train journeys.
Train travel is increasingly a window to the stark inequality that prevails in this country. As he was returning from Hyderabad recently, even as travellers in his train were complaining about the AC not functioning properly, across the platform stood the train to Darbhanga. “Cheeks were pressed hard against the window grill in the unreserved compartment as people continued to pour in. Forget about two Indias, there were two realities on the same platform,” he says.
Since 2014, he has often been stopped by the police who ask him the same question: where are you from? His middle name, Mustafa, and last name often lead them to believe Gilani is Kashmiri. Gilani is a Mumbaikar, he tells them. They still want to know his ‘origin’. Gilani, someone should tell them, is the citizen more of us should be.
The author is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.
