BackWhen politics gets social
In the run-up to the general election, social media companies explain how the political campaigns this time are very different from what they were five years ago
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“Okay, I didn’t gain anything. I lost," Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s Arvind Kejriwal conceded disarmingly during a town hall meeting on Facebook last week. He was responding to a question from Candidates 2014 host Madhu Trehan on his much critiqued dharna (sit-in protest) during his 49-day chief ministership of Delhi.
Even as elections to 543 constituencies approach, political parties and politicians are putting their online campaigns in top gear. Sample some of the activity in just the last week. On Sunday, the Indian National Congress party asked voters to share their thoughts on what to include in the party’s Lok Sabha election manifesto—on Twitter. On 8 March, Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate, held the second session in his Chai Pe Charcha with NaMo series—this time on women’s empowerment. And All India Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s “Girls are our assets" post on Facebook was liked more than 22,000 times.
There are many new services being launched online in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.
Know your candidate
On 20 April 2011, US President Barack Obama appeared on Facebook Talks Live, opening the floodgates for a new kind of engagement between political leaders and the electorate. Cut to almost three years later, and the Facebook-led “town hall" meeting has come to India. On 4 March, Candidates 2014 launched with Kejriwal taking questions on issues like women’s safety, reservation for the backward classes and the plight of contractual workers, and detailing his vision for the country. A video of the town hall is available on Facebook and YouTube and has been viewed at least 30,000 times. As part of the format of the town hall, the questions came in equal parts from the live audience, Trehan and from a pool of questions submitted on the Facebook India page.
To the agile leader then, social media can be more than just another pulpit to broadcast views and give a speech from. It’s something Sunil Abraham, executive director of The Centre for Internet And Society, a non-profit research organization, can’t stress enough. “Social media provides unmediated access; in that sense it is a tremendously effective tool," says Bangalore-based Abraham in a phone interview. “The question is, are political parties agile enough to take advantage of it?"
Tracking devices
Alongside Candidates 2014, Facebook last week launched its India Election Tracker data dashboard. The tracker maps the popularity of politicians and political parties, as well as top-of-the-mind issues that voters who have Internet access care about. The dashboard uses “mentions on Facebook" as the metric for the graph.
Following his appearance on Candidates 2014, Kejriwal has overtaken both Modi and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi as the top “trending" politician on the tracker. Among the issues that voters care about, jobs and education continue to be more important to Indian Facebook users than corruption and healthcare.
While the tracker only crunches data from Facebook, the company’s 93 million monthly active users (MAUs)—about half the Internet subscriber base of the country—make it an indicator of the mood of voters who have digital access.
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Abraham says there are at least two reasons the trackers should be taken with a pinch of salt. The first, he says, is that “given the level of Internet, and especially broadband, penetration in the country, only the elite are likely to spare time to participate in social media. And so while these trackers are a reliable dipstick of how the elite think about these issues, the data is not representative of the whole population." The second, he explains, is that in India, media, and especially Internet, literacy is low compared with countries like the US, and people here have access to limited services like Facebook and Twitter on their phones even when they don’t have access to the Internet. So such trend trackers could present a skewed view of what people really care about.
Riding pillion
The difference now is that some of these on-ground initiatives are being neatly tied in with the online strategy. For example, on Monday, a political rally led by Gandhi in Tonk, Rajasthan, was streamed live on the Congress party’s YouTube channel. On the same day, Modi took out a Hunkar rally in Purnia, Bihar, which was streamed live on his website, www.narendramodi.in, and had amassed nearly 17,000 views on YouTube at the time of going to print.
Political parties have also been using the online medium to announce on-ground rallies. Sample this update by Banerjee, posted on Monday: “Day after tomorrow at 1pm I will be attending a Rally at Ramlila Maidan at New Delhi, where Annaji (social activist Anna Hazare) will be addressing the gathering. May I appeal to all my brothers and sisters to join and extend full support at Ramlila Maidan, if time permits. I may also address the gathering."
Abraham says Indian politicians are still not using the social media for a two-way interaction. “Social media means having a conversation with voters. It is more pluralistic and organic whereas most politicians’ pages do little more than repeat the party line. If you look at the pages, you’ll find that they are followed by a lot of people but they don’t themselves follow many others. Few politicians engage voters in one-on-one interactions or respond directly to a comment on Twitter." To Abraham, these are signs that the political parties have by and large grafted their “broadcast strategy" on to the social media.
Of course, there are some exceptions to this. Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah last week responded to posts by Kashmiri students in Uttar Pradesh who had been thrown out of their hostels following a skirmish after they celebrated a Pakistan win in a cricket match.
The numbers story
Of course politicians and their supporters realize that a large number of voters in India do not, in fact, have access to the Internet. Some are taking technology to areas outside the big cities, even if it is momentarily. When Modi appeared in the first of a series of Chai Pe Charcha programmes organized by the not-for-profit Citizens for Accountable Governance on 12 February, the Gujarat chief minister “spoke" to the audience at 1,000 tea stalls in 300 cities, via video-conferencing and live streaming, for around 2 hours over the proverbial cup of tea. To reach out to people outside Ahmedabad who do not have Internet access, the team from the not-for-profit had volunteers put up projector screens across hundreds of locations, and video-conferencing facilities in some 30 locations, including Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, to enable a two-way interaction between the attendees and Modi.
The social media is throwing up some impressive numbers, such as Modi’s 11 million-plus likes on Facebook and Kejriwal’s nearly 5 million likes. These bode well for the role of social media in the campaigns of tomorrow.
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