The controversial crowdfunding platform ‘Our Democracy’ that was used by some Modi haters is online again. This time, Congress leader Jignesh Mevani has been seen using it extensively to raise funds for his election campaign. Mevani’s campaign was launched on the website on November 16.
On the launch of the campaign, Mevani released a video and claimed that being a “non-corrupt” MLA is not easy in the time of the “sale and purchase” of MLAs. He further added that he was fighting with the “BJP Forces”.
https://t.co/s1B8AURBC2
— Jignesh Mevani (@jigneshmevani80) November 16, 2022
जनता की लड़ाई जनता के चंदे से।
ऊपर दिए गए लिंक पर क्लिक करें और मुझे चुनाव लड़ने में मदद करें। pic.twitter.com/BFSlfQsfqT
Interestingly, Jignesh urged people to spread the link on WhatsApp, the platform he has been ridiculing for a long time. He has been seen mocking BJP supporters by hinting they get their data from “WhatApp University”, a slang used for fake news spread on the messaging platform.
Another interesting aspect of Jignesh’s campaign on Our Democracy is that it does not mention his political affiliation. Though Jignesh is contesting Congress’s ticket from the Vadgam seat, there is no mention of the Congress party on the campaign page. Last time, Mevani won the election as an independent candidate with Congress’s support. Notably, former Congress leader Manilal Vaghela who had won the 2012 election from Vadgam, is contesting the election against Mevani on BJP’s ticket.
Mevani has been asking for Rs 40 lakh to contest the elections. So far, he has raised over Rs 6.9 lakh. Started by one Divya Gaur, there were over 650 supporters of the campaign by the time this report was published. Top donors included a donor named Teesta Setalvad, who donated Rs 30,000. It is unclear if this was the same Setalvad who was recently arrested by the Gujarat police for allegedly conspiring against then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi and attempting to get capital punishment for him in the Gujarat Riots 2002 case. It is not possible to identify the real identity of the donor. Notably, the website required PAN card details for donations above Rs 2,000.
The controversial history of ‘Our Democracy’
In January 2022, OpIndia reported that the website Our Democracy had gone offline mysteriously. The platform had given space to the likes of then-Congress supporter (now TMC leader) Saket Gokhale, Congress leader Kanhaiya Kumar, AAP leader Aatishi Marlena and many others. Mevani had also used the platform previously.
Notably, in November 2019, Gokhale tweeted a link to his crowdfunding platform asking people to cough up money because he chose to give up his ‘cushy job’ to ‘fight the BJP/RSS’, which he usually did with filing frivolous RTIs which cost just Rs 10. He urged other Modi haters to assemble and pay him so he could pay his bills and not have to take up a regular job. Later, several donors raised questions over how Gokhale used the funds collected.
At that time, OpIndia dug a little deeper into the crowdfunding platform and found some curious connections. Former NDTV journalist Bilal Zaidi, who had also worked with channels such as Times Now and WION, started the platform ‘Crowdnewsing’ with one Anand Mangnale, an online crowdfunding platform for independent journalists. This was back in 2017.
However, just before the 2019 general elections, they decided to expand the platform and changed it to ‘OurDemocracy’ and provided the platform even to politicians like Kanhaiya Kumar and Atishi Marlena and unemployed individuals like Saket Gokhale who had quit their jobs to file RTIs full time.
We also found that Anand Mangnale, the cofounder of Crowdnewsing as well as ‘OurDemocracy’, had planted himself in WhatsApp groups in January 2020 during the violence that took place in JNU, where he appeared to be coordinating the violence that was taking place on the campus.
His number appeared in a SS shared by Barkha Dutt. A Google search of the number which Dutt inadvertently shared on Twitter revealed it was the same number Congress had used for a crowdfunding campaign. That page has now been taken off. Anand Mangnale has previously worked with TMC’s poll strategist Prashant Kishore, who had earlier worked as a strategist for ex-Congress President Rahul Gandhi in 2016 ahead of the Uttar Pradesh state assembly elections. OpIndia could not independently verify whether Mangnale was part of the team for Rahul Gandhi’s alleged “image makeover”.
Our Democracy made a comeback in July this year. On July 4, they announced on Twitter that they had got a new CEO, Umar Siddiqui.
On July 8, they announced that the website was live again. Though the activity since then was minimal, it started pushing videos and campaign links for Jignesh on November 17.
Notably, there are six other campaigns with very little activity. One of them is an old campaign that was started for AAP candidate Cynthia Stephen for the BBMP elections in September of this year. The BBMP elections are scheduled for December. Notably, Cynthia Stephen herself has not shared the link to the campaign on her official Twitter handle. However, she shared it once on her Facebook account. The campaign has raised over Rs 64,000.
Other campaigners using the platform are AAP leader Hargovan Debhi (collected over Rs 25,000), AAP leader Vipul Parmar (collected over Rs 1,000), AAP leader Ashu Thakur (collected over Rs 49,000), AAP leader Kailashdan Gadhvi (collected nothing), and AAP leader Beena Balguher (collected over Rs 5,000). Mevani’s campaign has been the most successful so far. The record of old campaigns has been wiped out from the website.
