Rajneeti by Gautam Chintamani

Author:Gautam Chintamani [Chintamani, Gautam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353054892
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

10

Take It to the Voter

The years between 2010 and 2013 will perhaps go down in history as one of the most significant periods in the contemporary socio-political history of India. Following the 2008 US presidential elections, where nearly 75 per cent of the adult voter population, which translated to 55 per cent of the entire adult population of the United States of America, went online to either take part in or get news and information, the Internet emerged as a significant tool for the politician to connect with the electorate and the manner in which the voter responded.1 This was a phenomenon waiting to be replicated in India. While 2009 did not see the Internet play a major role, the combination of a burgeoning young voter base and the advent of social and news media was rewriting the rules of the game. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were not only bringing the world closer, they were giving the average Indian a peek into what was happening in the world by relaying global events such as the Arab Spring or the devastating earthquake in Haiti in real time.

There was a tectonic shift inside the mind of the politically active Internet user. Although, with 2.5 million Facebook users in June 2009, social media was not the ‘battleground’ for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the rate at which it was growing—17 million by December 2010 and 28 million by June 2011—was a portent of things to come.2 Beginning in 2009–10, the situation in India mirrored the United States where the politically aware Internet user, especially the younger voter, switched away from news sites as they barely offered anything that matched their political views and headed towards social media.

What makes social media potentially capable of making a big difference in an election is the demography of its user base. In October 2010, nearly 53 per cent of Facebook users were in the 18–25 age group which, in a country where the median age in the same period was 25.1 years, meant this was a big constituency waiting to be addressed.3

After taking over as the BJP’s national president, Nitin Gadkari continued with the agenda of keeping the party’s focus on development, socio-economic reform and nationalism. Gadkari always regarded politics as an instrument of socio-economic reform and, for him, good governance was an essential prerequisite. The BJP constituted a good governance cell under Manohar Parikkar to study all government schemes and address the issue of development across not just the nine states in which the BJP was in power but also states such as West Bengal, where the Left had been in power for nearly three decades, as well as states like Tamil Nadu.4 In order to prepare the cadre to be able to deliver better, Gadkari understood the significance of laying a foundation on which it could be brought up to speed with the changing world and started a training programme to train 10,000 party workers annually. Unlike the Congress or most other

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