For a man who was once dubbed as “India’s first social media prime minister”, Narendra Modi appears shaken up by the massive cyber backlash Bharatiya Janata Party faced in the recent Gujarat elections.
While addressing the BJP parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday, Modi asked party leaders not to fall prey to social media propaganda and stressed on the need to step up party’s digital campaigning for 2019 Lok Sabha election.
This was Modi’s first interaction with the BJP’s parliamentarians after the party scraped through the Assembly elections in his home state of Gujarat.
“Modi-ji asked party leaders not to be affected by the social media propaganda mounted by the opposition,” a BJP MP, who was present in meeting, told Scroll.in. “He also said that the Lok Sabha election of 2019 would be very crucial and that the party’s social media campaigning would require a major improvement to meet the new challenge.”
The concern that the BJP could not adequately meet the social media challenge posed by the Congress during Gujarat elections has been haunting the party brass for quite some time.
As early as in September, almost at the beginning of the election campaign in Modi’s home state, the party was left perturbed when messages critical of the “Gujarat model of development” started becoming viral on social media. The situation became so alarming that party president Amit Shah had appealed to youth of Gujarat not to believe the “anti-BJP propaganda” being mounted by the Congress on social media.
“I appeal to the youth not to blindly believe the anti-BJP propaganda being spread on WhatsApp and Facebook. Before making any judgment, you need to do analysis of what was Gujarat before the BJP came to power and what is the situation today,” Shah had said on September 10.
All the while since the Lok Sabha election of 2014, which was dubbed as “India’s first social media election”, the BJP had remained largely unchallenged in digital campaigning. No other political outfit, apart from Aam Aadmi Party during Delhi Assembly elections, had been able to match the BJP on this crucial front.
However, for the first time in Gujarat elections, the BJP appeared to be getting outsmarted by its opponents in this battlefield.
Though the BJP won the election in Gujarat with a reduced margin, Modi’s latest concern only shows that the concerted effort by his opponents to target the party on social media has left its mark.
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