Cyberspace is India's new political platform

Politicians taking to social networking to reach out to young, tech-savvy electorate

By Krittivas Mukherjee, The Straits Times, 14 Oct 2012

When top opposition leader and potential prime minister of India Narendra Modi hosted a chat on Google+ Hangout last month, tens of thousands of viewers logged in.

In fact, the site crashed briefly - a sure sign of his success in reaching out to Indian voters in the most modern of ways.

Not to be outdone, the Indian government responded within days. It held a press conference on Twitter, where a tech-savvy state adviser was inundated with questions.

Both events were a first in India, a far cry from a time when a media platform for political parties meant either a newspaper or television and radio airtime, advertising space that had to be bought.

But as India grows, boosting access to the information revolution, political parties in the world's biggest democracy are aggressively tapping into the power of social media. A growing number are turning to the trendy networks to share their views with millions of young, Internet-savvy Indians.

Now, about a tenth of India's 1.2 billion people use the Internet, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. Almost all of them are of voting age or will get the right to vote by 2014, just in time for the next national elections.

There are about 60 million Facebook users and 20 million on Twitter. As more people use smartphones and tablets, the number of Internet users in India is likely to grow at around 15 per cent annually.

"Politicians in India have been slow to recognise the power of this medium but they are beginning to understand it," says Dr N. Bhaskara Rao, head of the Centre for Media Studies, a New Delhi think-tank.

"Now it's no more about being on TV or in the newspapers. You have to have an online presence if you care about connecting with the young generation."

It was an opportunity, Dr Rao says, seized first by India's main opposition, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to which Mr Modi belongs, that counts the educated, middle class as its core vote bank.

Its leaders were quick to dig deep into the resources of social networks. They engaged online users with an interactive Facebook page, which has close to 350,000 "likes" and even has an online fund-raising video campaign.

Most of its top leaders are on Twitter and YouTube and some of them are regular bloggers. Among the BJP's top online presence is Mr Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, who has half a million followers on Twitter. He has also started a cable TV station.

By comparison, the ruling Congress, the country's oldest surviving political party, has been slow to take to the online forums.

Many of the party leaders are now on Twitter and Facebook, defending the government and pushing their party philosophy, yet some of its key leaders are unseen on the Web world, partly due to the overbearing influence of an old guard in the organisation which is wary of introducing new thinking.

"It has been my impression that the Hindutva elements have had a head start over the Congress in the use of the online media, including the social media networks," Mr B. Raman, a former Indian spy chief, wrote in his blog in August.

Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, a potential prime minister in 2014, has no Twitter account. His mother and party chief, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, seen as a traditionalist, is also invisible on social networking sites.

"In the Congress, it's a very one leader-centric party - the party president - so other party leaders are not sure how it will be taken," says Dr Rao.

Still, the government, which is led by the Congress party, is making an effort to appear Internet-savvy. The prime minister's office joined Twitter and YouTube only recently.

India's top Twitter user is a Congress lawmaker, Mr Shashi Tharoor. In 2010, Mr Tharoor, then deputy foreign minister, drew the ire of his party over his tweets, some of them unflattering towards his own government.

Mr Tharoor has 1.5 million followers and is one of the most influential online voices out of India.

The Congress did itself no favours when the government cracked down on websites and social media in August, trying to stop the spread of rumours blamed for sparking tension among thousands of migrant workers from India's north-east living in its southern cities.

But the party is trying to catch up, deploying workers to counter the opposition's online campaigns.

Other parties, including the communists, have yet to elevate their online engagement beyond a customary party website.

To be sure, India is still mired in mass poverty, where some 80 per cent of its population live on less than a US dollar (S$1.24) a day and the reach of the Internet is still small.

This means the medium's ability to swing electoral fortunes remains limited.

Still, Internet penetration is rising and most of India's estimated 250 million middle class families have access to it.

Civil society activists and non-profit groups in India have used social media effectively, including to organise a popular anti-corruption campaign against the government in recent months.

"You cannot deny the multiplier effect of the Internet," says Dr. Rao. "You will see, as we move closer to 2014, more and more politicians and political parties will come online.