Image Doctor Takes Video Chariots to Villagers : India: Vans with big screens, cassettes make a powerful impression. Their inventor sees a way to garner votes.

The first time DrK. Jain’s Video Chariots came blaring into the remote, backward villages of south India earlier this year, many in his largely illiterate audience thought they were watching black magic.

The villagers had no electricity. They still made furrows in the fields with their bare feet, and their idea of irrigation was praying to the Hindu rain god. Many had never even heard of television, and, certainly, none knew a TV screen could be the size of a truck.

Yet suddenly, right in the heart of their own village of dust and straw, there was Dr. Jain’s sleek, Japanese-built van, opening up to reveal an eight-foot-square screen, back-lit by a high-powered 600-lumen projector, attached to a state-of-the-art videocassette player and powered by its own portable generator.

The program for the night: politics--specifically, an entertaining campaign video in their own local dialect that is part of a high-tech, electoral revolution taking place in the largest democracy on earth.

It is the latest wrinkle that reflects Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s five-year effort to transform ancient and moribund India into a modern state--”to fuse,” as Gandhi pledged when he took power five years ago, “the wisdom of our seers with the insights and artifacts of science and technology. To build an India of the 21st Century.”

But, with a passionate personal dislike for the prime minister and more than 30 video chariots to carry his message home, Jain is using his ultra-modern recording studio in New Delhi and his mobile image machines in ways that may not be exactly what Gandhi had in mind.

As campaigning began nationwide this week for the most hotly contested and unpredictable general elections in Indian history, Jain has launched his own campaign to turn Gandhi’s high-tech revolution against him.

Using a computerized collage of what he calls “electronic posters,” “psychedelic symbolism” and “a cheerful revolution of high technology,” Jain, a surgeon turned image-maker, is providing India’s now largely unified political opposition with an alternative to Gandhi’s own video campaign on the powerful, state-run national television network and taking that message to rich rural vote banks where not even government television can reach.

“The government has a monopoly on television in this country,” Jain said. “But technology is nobody’s monopoly. And what we are offering, no television network in the world can: portable theaters that can target captive markets right in their own back yards.”

On the surface, Jain’s video campaign--and indeed, Gandhi’s own slick, video assault--appear to be something of a mutation from the progressive prime minister’s original high-tech vision.

When the then-largely apolitical Gandhi was swept to power on a sympathy wave after his mother’s assassination in 1984, he pledged to use high-tech as a tool of development, not politics; to harness satellites and computers for locating underground drinking water, not for identifying hidden vote banks; for immunizing millions of children, not politicizing millions of voters.

In fact, Gandhi’s Administration has used advanced technology successfully to help rural India. His high-tech initiatives have doubled the success rate for finding and digging drinking wells. They have helped to cushion the country’s 830 million people against a devastating drought two years ago. They have brought life-saving vaccines to millions in remote regions. And they have vastly improved India’s telecommunications system, once among the world’s worst.

But such advances have not made much of an impression on a campaign full of such sexy political issues as corruption, religious communalism and rising prices, and the technology through which they were achieved is still at several removes from the Indian masses.

To Sam Pitroda, Gandhi’s American-trained high-technology guru, the failure has not been in the government’s use of technology, but in the presentation of it.

“We have mismanaged the concept of high-tech,” said Pitroda, who gave up his U.S. citizenship to join Gandhi as his personal adviser on technology five years ago. “Whenever we talk of high technology, we assume it is urban, elite, foreign, exotic, fancy and sexy. We don’t project the image that technology is just for problem-solving. And, really, that’s all it is.”

As a result, the Indian public has equated Gandhi’s high-tech boom with computer toys, electronic gadgetry and video-cassette recorders, all of which have taken the Indian middle class by storm but remain far out of the reach of rural villages, where as many as 80% of all Indians live.

Referring specifically to Jain and his video-on-wheels enterprise, Pitroda smiled and said, “That’s only petty, little stuff. High-tech isn’t just TV.

“But this is the price you pay in a democracy. With a lot of good, some misuses are bound to go on.”

Obviously, that is not the way Jain sees his multimillion-dollar enterprise.

In fact, he said, Jain Studios also entered the world of high technology initially to help open the doors of development to his backward nation. But, in the overly politicized and polarized context of today’s India, not even technology has been spared. Jain insisted that he was locked out of access to the mass media.

“I first got involved in all of this because I wanted to go into medical television,” he said. “I produced videos aimed at the illiterate villagers on family planning, sanitation, primary health care and similar subjects.

“I had hoped to sell these videos to Doordarshan (India’s state-run television network). But they sort of black-listed me.”

Jain is a long-standing, ranking member of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), and he claims his videos were blocked simply because of his strong and outspoken political affiliation. So he charted a course of high-tech revenge.

“I said we should make better videos and even better programming than Doordarshan and target them to specific districts,” he said.

Jain and his wife went on intensive buying trips to Japan and America, and, under Gandhi’s liberalized import policy for technology, Jain built his state-of-the-art studio here, complete with 3-D computer graphics machines, dozens of editing and display consoles and a staff of 400 engineers, among them a core group of young, American-trained computer hackers.

Still, Jain is the first to concede that his video chariots will have little nationwide impact on the upcoming elections. In a sprawling nation of more than 100 dialects and 400 million voters that more resembles a continent than a country, the image doctor hopes only to sway key, critical races where the opposition has hired his services.

“I have only made an idea become a reality,” he said. “And regardless of the outcome of the election, win or lose, I really hope only that this experiment will lead to a more productive use of the technology.

“I have, for example, about 20 family planning videos that have never been shown. They’re based on folklore and traditional music, combined with state-of-the-art computer graphics. I know they will work. And, well, maybe if the opposition comes to power, perhaps I can even get them on the air someday.”