With the Lok Sabha elections around the corner, several social media volunteers have come out in support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, just like in 2014.
These volunteers are not party members but professionals, who are either taking leave from their regular jobs or doing it after office hours. Social media was used effectively by the BJP as a propaganda tool for the first time during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
“In 2014, we had estimated that social media will influence around 160 Lok Sabha seats,” said a BJP leader who was associated with the 2014 social media campaign. “In 2014, there were 77 crore mobile connections which has now grown up to 102 crore till November last year. Similarly, internet connections have grown from 15 crore to 56 core in last five years. In the changed scenario, we expect social media to influence around 400 Lok Sabha seats in 2019.”
On January 18, BJP’s social media team started a campaign with hashtag #5YearsChallenge highlighting the development work carried out in five years of the Modi government. In the last couple of months, several hashtags such as ModiforPM, ModiOnceMore, MyFirstVotefor-Modi, ModiForMiddleClass and ISupportNamo have surfaced on the social media to propagate BJP’s poll agenda.
Some networks came into existence during the 2014 campaign but others like MyFirstVoteForModi, ModiOnceMore, ModiForMiddleClass are new volunteer groups that have come into force keeping in mind the 2019 campaign.
“These are unaffiliated self-motivated volunteer groups which have organised themselves to see that Modi comes back as PM again in 2019,” says Amit Malviya, head of BJP’s IT cell.
Vijay Chada, an IT professional from Bengaluru, was a volunteer in Mission 272Plus campaign in 2014. Last year in September, he and a group of professionals started the ModiOnceMore campaign. “It is always a collective effort of a team and not an individual effort,” says Chada, who has left his job to run the campaign.
Similarly, IT professional Ashutosh Muglikar, who was a volunteer in 2014, has joined a group of professionals from Maharashtra to start the MyFirstVoteForModi campaign. “Our idea is to reach out to the first time voter and get them enrolled in the voting list and then motivate them why they should vote for Modi Ji,” he says.
One of his teammates, Sharanya Shetty is running MiddleClassWithModi. “This campaign is a hit on social media with over 40,000 tweets the day we started it,” says Muglikar. Muglikar has never met PM Modi or any senior BJP leader but he is happy being followed by the PM on Twitter. “Sometimes senior party leaders retweet our campaigns or use the same hashtags which we use. That’s more than enough for us.”
Popular platform
The national co-convener of ModiforPM social media campaign, Abhishek Gupta, feels Whatsapp is the most effective medium when it comes to propagating a message. Started in 2012, the group is now working with a core team in almost every state. “I personally handle several WhatsApp groups and it helps in countering the negative agenda of the opposition,” says Gupta.
“Two days ago, when Congress leader B K Hariprasad mocked the illness of BJP president Amit Shah, Gupta drafted a message and sent it to all volunteers on the WhatsApp group with specific instructions. “I told them to make some changes so that it doesn’t look copied and spread this to as many people as they can in several other groups,” he said.
Vikas Pandey, who runs Isupport-NarendraModi page on Facebook and claims to have 1.6 crore followers across social media platforms, agrees about the reach of Facebook.
“Twitter is good for perception building among certain class of people but Facebook is the real game changer,” he says. “With data becoming cheaper, Facebook is used by a large population in the villages.” But Pandey feels these days Facebook has become stricter and they target certain pages just because someone complains about the content. “I run several other groups apart from this but can’t disclose as Facebook will start targeting these groups on someone’s complain,” he says.
2019 challenge
“In 2014, people realised it for the first time that social media is important for elections. We were ahead of the competition,” says Muglikar. “But now everyone is there. Also, BJP was in opposition and now the party is in power. So, there is anti-incumbency too.”
Abhishek Gutpa of ModiForPM believes that the biggest challenge is to counter personality targets. “Opponents are targeting PM Modi or CM Yogi more than the government. Earlier, we also targeted Rahul Gandhi but since he is in opposition and has won few elections, the so-called Pappu narrative doesn’t work. We will have to shift the discourse on development and government rather than personality attack.”
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