Move over, YouTube comedians and Instagram models.
The OG of social media influencers in India is now the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. At 73, his deft handling of message and medium underscores his online domination. And I don’t mean this in a trivial way.
Politics in India today is deeply digital. The viral photograph, the livestream, the WhatsApp forward, the selfie, the meme, the hashtag — everything is a weapon in the political war, as digitization alters how issues are experienced, debated, and decided on.
And the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has mastered this craft, while other parties are still playing catch-up.
Political pundits offer different and very compelling reasons for why Modi keeps winning elections: the cult of personality, Hindutva, nationalism, an environment of polarization, and an inchoate opposition. But what many underestimate is how the political matrix has been remade by a society that now devours digital content.
Long before the last general elections, Modi told his cabinet colleagues that the election would be fought on the smartphone. Today, India consumes the largest amount of mobile data per smartphone user in the world. Both fans and critics of Modi argue that India has changed in the decade since he — and the BJP — came to power in 2014. But we don’t pay enough attention to how dramatically data consumption in India has changed in almost exactly the same period. To decode the shifts in India’s electoral politics — Modi’s second win in 2019 marked a major 48-year milestone, and polls say he’s cruising to a third term — you also need to understand the impact of technology.
Till 2012, India accounted for only 2% of the world’s mobile data traffic. Then came the dramatic fall in prices, triggered by the launch of Mukesh Ambani’s Jio 4G mobile network. With a tantalizing offer of 4GB free data per day, along with cheap handsets, Ambani ensured that Indians were consuming 1 billion GB of data every month within six months of Jio’s launch, compared to 200 million GB earlier. Today, Indians use more data than the U.S. and China combined. And India accounts for more than 21% of the world’s mobile data traffic.
This digital data explosion has enabled a new kind of voter bloc: the culturally rooted, tech-savvy traditionalist with aspirations of social and economic mobility. WhatsApp groups have replaced neighborhood parks as the new community centers. Last year, Indians downloaded 26 billion apps. And 30% of teenagers who can’t read a paragraph of text can still browse the internet; more than half can easily find a video on YouTube.
Modi’s use of social media will be the playbook for politicians in various parts of the world.”
Modi understands the power these numbers can unleash. For him, mainstream media is irrelevant — partly because he has in the past cast them in the role of biased adversaries, but more because he has built his brand on the politics of direct political communication.
“Modi’s use of social media will be the playbook for politicians in various parts of the world — he is the apex predator of the social media food chain,” Joyojeet Pal, who studies the role of technology in democracy and labor at the University of Michigan, told me. “He’s not just on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn; he has over 100 playlists on YouTube. There was a time he could make social media celebs salute on demand, now he doesn’t even have to try because it is part of their ritual.”
A recent unexpected spat between India and the Maldives brought this home.
Photographs of Modi snorkeling and strolling in majestic solitude by the luminous blue waters of a Lakshadweep beach went instantly viral — like everything else Modi does on the internet. Within hours, the images triggered a backlash from the Maldivian ruling party’s politicians, who made derogatory remarks about Modi, calling him “a clown” and “a puppet of Israel.”
The president of the Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu — who is seen as pro-China — was elected to office on the back of an anti-India campaign. Modi’s images from Lakshadweep were viewed by some of his colleagues as an attempt to create an alternate tourist destination to the Maldives.
Soon, dozens of India’s top celebrities, actors, and sports icons posted on X, urging Indians to explore domestic tourist spots. The significance was not lost on anyone: Indians are the biggest tourism market for the Maldives. The elite superstars now calling for an effective boycott of Maldives were all regular visitors of the archipelagic nation. To prevent further fallout, the Maldives government suspended the three ministers who had made the negative remarks.
The recent inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was a made-for-mobile moment.
The recent inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was another made-for-mobile moment.
In the weeks leading up to the temple’s consecration, marketing agencies offered to create campaigns with “unifying hashtags that resonate with Hindus globally.” Web streaming services offered “in-app initiatives [that] bring the festivities of the Ram Mandir inauguration to every user, right at their fingertips.” Presiding over the ceremony was the prime minister — not just the offline patron of ritual, but also the patriarch of this virtual universe.
And that’s not everything. Ahead of the elections in May, officials have initiated a drive to build 3D “selfie points” at railway platforms to highlight the government’s achievements, alongside a life-size cutout of the prime minister. Notwithstanding the opposition’s criticism of wasteful expenditure (costs are reported to be anywhere between $1,200 and $6,000 per booth), the plan is moving ahead.
Whether it is ideas such as these or the prime minister’s decision to follow relatively unknown people on X, the political strategy is clear: Build an online community of loyalists who can be deployed at will, and often even without so much as a nudge.
“In September 2013, on his birthday, Modi offered follow-backs to a large set of social media accounts on Twitter that had been actively retweeting him,” Pal said. “Overnight, they proclaimed on their profiles ‘proud to be followed by @narendramodi,’ and [held] that up as a badge and a perpetual call to action to be the cavalry for the outreach. Obama tried follow-backs in [an] amateur mode in 2008; the Modi campaign honed it as a strategy for loyalty-signaling.”
None of this is to suggest that brick-and-mortar politics have lost value. Grassroots mobilization, face-to-face outreach, and party-affiliated foot soldiers all remain critical. But at the intersection of identity politics and technological advances, there is a new language of political messaging. It has fundamentally changed how elections are fought, won, or lost.
As the tagline at the Modi selfie points goes, “Yeh Naya Bharat Hain” — This is a new India. And the rules of the game have changed.
