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Big numbers are staring us in the face again. We have come across reports of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) raising an army of cyber workers (in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh more recently) to push its social media campaign ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections with unfailing regularity.
The efforts are perhaps inspired by the perception of the windfall gains that accrued to the saffron party because of its near monopoly over social media in the 2014 general elections. Is a repeat of the same likely?
Days after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Financial Times published a report calling Narendra Modi “India’s first social media prime minister’’.
The New York Times used a variation of the same theme a few months later and wrote that “his social media success is not simply because of India’s population. It’s the result of a strategy to use social platforms to bypass traditional media outlets and reach supporters directly.”
According to a Quartz article, from the date of announcement of elections to the conclusion of polling, nearly 29 million people were engaged in 227 million interactions regarding elections on Facebook.
Almost half of all such people spoke about the BJP’s then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi in their interactions.
The field was wide open for the tech savvy Modi to spot the trend early and pummel the then incumbent with effective slogans.
Incidentally, one of the weapons to beat the incumbent then was the widespread phenomenon of falling jobs in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Jobs or the lack of them remained one of the topmost trending topics throughout the election process last time.
What helped the BJP then was its ability to build narratives around the politics of hope and the accompanying dream of achhe din.
But that was more than four years ago. Now that we are headed for a first-of-its-kind election with digital footprint achieving a critical mass in the country, are we going to witness an action replay of 2014?
According to this report, “between 25 April and 15 May, Twitter saw more than 3 million mentions in relation to the #KarnatakaElections2018.” While the “BJP garnered 51 percent of the share of voice on Twitter, the Congress took 42 percent” of mentions. Reports suggest that in Gujarat too, the BJP’s social media domination did not remain unchallenged.
What has led to this change? The sheer spread of digital footprint across the country in the last four years has perhaps contributed to the democratisation of the cyber space, with competing voices squaring off constantly and therefore cancelling each other’s effectiveness.
Only 200 million of the total of more than 800 million electorates had access to the Internet in 2014. The Internet base has expanded to nearly 500 million now. The average monthly usage of data has increased 15 times in the same period – from a mere 0.26 GB in 2014 to nearly 4 GB by the end of 2017.
With Indians spending nearly 4 hours a day on mobile phones now compared to very little few years ago, twists and turns in the cyber space are going to have huge implications on the elections. Here are some:
Elections sans a social media wave in favour of a particular party or candidate will revolve around the track record of the incumbent.
Given the strong phase of anti-incumbency we have been passing through (data shows that incumbents get re-elected only when governments deliver better on the growth parameters), will the BJP be as confident, as it has been the incumbent in most parts of the country?
My own hunch is that given the kind of fatigue we have had with a daily overdose of jingoism and accompanying mobocracy, shrill voices and boastful claims – both in real as well as in the cyber space – we are going to have an election that will be fought on real bijli, sadak and paani (electricity, roads and water) issues.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
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