Social media: Indian politics

Social media became an integral part of the US and European hustings a long time ago. The victory of President Obama in the 2012 US Presidential election was due to the potent force of the social media and its exploitation to the hilt. The Democrat’s ploy of laying greater emphasis on micro-targeted messaging through Twitter and Facebook paid off substantially! While Obama had 33 million fans on Facebook, his Republican rival Romney had only 12 million. Now, the social media messaging trend is picking up speed in India too. Even though it’s largely urban-centric, political parties are waking up to the reality that the phenomena can be leveraged to tilt the results in the battle of ballot.

Leading from the front, and predictably so, is BJP’s Gujarat CM Narendra Modi, who is kind of frontrunning himself as the prime ministerial candidate. He has the highest number of Facebook fans among Indian politicians. Being tech-savvy, Modi started his cyber campaigns long back, during Gujarat’s 2007 assembly polls, through the BJP IT cell. But this time around, his expansive embrace of the social media is expected to reap rich dividends. Already, he has received 9,37,692 likes on his Facebook community page, called 'Narendra Modi for PM'.

Like Modi, politicos from other parties too have been swift to climb on the social media bandwagon. Congress party worthies such as Shashi Tharoor and P. Chidambaram have been particularly adept. Chidambaram, in fact, hosted online interactions with an eye to democratize his Budget this year. The ruling UPA coalition, too, is striving to make its presence felt on social media sites and has been showing a distinct fervour for e-press releases. As such television promotions and debates have an extension now – TV programmes are being debated and dissected on online interactive sites and the two are becoming increasingly integrated. And the television channels have been quick to wake up to this reality. News stations like CNN are introducing on-screen hashtags – a means to exchange tweets with the audience.

A recent report by IRIS Knowledge Foundation and the Internet and Mobile Association of India have highlighted that around 160 constituencies (out of the total of 543 constituencies) will be impacted by internet campaigns in the 2014 General Elections. As per the study, Maharashtra will have the maximum 21 high impact constituencies followed by Gujarat (17), Uttar Pradesh (14), Tamil Nadu (12), Andhra Pradesh (11) and Kerala (10).

No wonder that politicians are leaning more heavily on networking sites to woo the voters in their favour. Even though only 150 million people out of a population of 1.2 billion use internet in India, there are around 62 million people active on social media sites. But 160 constituencies are enough to shift the balance in tightly contested multi-party contests. Quite rightly, political parties are now gearing up to fine-tune their online marketing strategies for the big event next year.