Placeholder canvas

Elections 2014: The Modi Effect

Date:

“Are you the kid who will be working on the social media during the 2014 General Elections?”

“What? I mean, sir, I have no idea about all this. Nobody told me anything about it at all.”

“Firstly, do not call me sir. You are the one they call Sahib around here, right?”

“Errr… Yes si.. Yes, my name is Sahib.”

“Well Sahib, you will be working with us on covering the 2014 General Elections on social media. Welcome to the Jungle boy.”

It has been over a year and a week since this conversation took place in the web division’s desk at Times Now’s office, a little over a month before the General Elections kicked off.

In retrospect, I think this conversation was one of the most important conversations of my life, because my life has never been the same since.

The day I entered J-School, I knew the future was going to be news on digital media. It was not something someone had told me, it was a gut feeling I had.

In my interview for the web division of Times Now, I was asked a question: What is the importance of social media in television news?

I remember very clearly I had answered that it is going to be the medium that will phase out television news in the country in the coming decade. Though my interviewer sniggered and I concluded I would never find a place for myself there, less than a month later, I was working deep into the night at the Social Media desk, trying to formulate plans for the channel’s social media strategy.

The 2014 General Elections were for me, my introduction to the world of Indian politics and a crash course in how a television media outlet in India functions.

My first day at work on the team was met by a difficult phase of streamlining the mediums which would be used and how we would be using those mediums.

Off that conversation I drew two conclusions: One. We were supposed to be present on all the platforms that Narendra Modi was going to be present on. Two. Whatever you do, do not, under any circumstances miss out on anything that resembled the colour saffron on social media. Saffron had to become our favourite colour from day one.

The subsequent month was a blur. My mind was swarming with hashtags, twitter handles, tweets, twitter heat maps, passwords of different social media platforms, photographs of Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi and most of all, a constant voice of Arnab Goswami had become my conscience. Is this news? Is this want the nation wants to know? Is this something that the people of India need to be told to make the best informed decision of who their next Prime Minister will be?

It was Saffron. My social media timeline and that of Times Now was flooded by it. And I will say this without mincing my words, I was in awe of the sheer effort deployed by BJP and their team in being relentless. Rahul Gandhi, Congress’ unannounced Prime Ministerial candidate was nowhere to be found on our timelines. He had become the single biggest joke at coffee breaks and water cooler banter. Like a lawyer giving his objection, I would say he had become incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial to the race all together.

Credit has to be given to Modi for understanding the power of social media in swaying public opinion towards yourself. Though it was not an unprecedented move, it changed the way people saw politics in the country. It changed the way people perceived their leaders. It changed the way India saw their Prime Minister.

Modi had become PM in the hearts and minds of Indians even before polling began across the country.

In hindsight, covering my first general election taught me everything I wanted to learn about journalism and about Narendra Modi. I was forced to read and research at length about how elections are held in India, how important they are and every detail about every member of possibly every political party in the country. All this, so that while we were covering the elections live, as results were dished out by opinion polls and the election commission, we knew who won and who lost and whom to trust and whom to just not pay attention to.

I remember clearly on May 16, while the world celebrated Modi’s victory, I fell in love with my bed. I ambled home at wee hours of the morning of May 17 and could not wake up for the next 16 hours. I realized then that the last month, in its truest form was how a newsroom was run and this is how I became a news man from a starry-eyed idealistic boy who had just left J-School.

However, my conclusion, on May 16, the day Narendra Modi was announced Prime Minister of India was this. This was the first time in India that a Prime Ministerial candidate in India had mounted a US presidential type campaign. Two, his strategy of integrating social media and modern technology like seflie booths with Modi and rallies being held in 3D was not entirely new. A similar campaign has been mounted by the Aam Aadmi Party in New Delhi in 2013, though at a much smaller scale. BJP had invested close to 700 crore in their Modi-everywhere election campaign, an amount a social experiment called AAP was nowhere close to pulling in.

Social Media and digital media today constitute for about 60% of news consumption platforms in the country. India, a country that does not pervasive internet presence and is heavily reliant on television and radio news, has grown leaps and bounds in terms of consuming news via the internet, be it on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter or on mobile applications of news channels and news websites.

I remember one night, in the run up to the elections; Arnab Goswami exited the news bay and walked angrily towards the social media desk. He came up to the desk and yelled for about half-an-hour about how a single spelling error in one the tweets had made someone in the upper echelons of a political party call him in the middle of his prime time show ‘The Newshour’ and ask him to remove the tweet otherwise the channel would be sued.

When the Editor-in-Chief of India’s biggest all-English news channel walks up to your desk and yells at you for a spelling mistake that could cost the organization millions, you get scared that you, the new guy, may the first one to lose their job. And that day, I understood the true power of social media and its association with news, both television and otherwise.

Hastags on Facebook and Twitter, photographs on Instagram, short eight second videos on Vine, a digital video and photo sharing platform on Snapchat, a news collation mobile application called Flipboard and Medium, an online article and news collation website and .01% of all the options available to a news channel and/or website today to share their articles and stories online.

So, as I write this article, sitting in my newsroom while the news channels on television go gaga over Modi’s maiden foreign tour to China, I send a thanks to that man who a year earlier opened my eyes to what news truly is. Covering the 2014 General Elections made me understand how the future of news was truly digital and the reason why I quit my job at Times Now and join NewsMobile.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Share post:

Subscribe

Popular

More like this
Related

Actor Govinda Joins Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena Ahead Of Lok Sabha Polls

Mumbai: In a significant development in Maharashtra's political landscape,...

Elections 2024: Legal Cases Against Donald Trump And How It Can Impact His Chances For Presidency

Former President Trump was indicted with charges of overturning the 2020 Presidential election and was indicted on Felony charges and also the violence of January 6 2021 in Washington D.C.

About 80,000 Leaders, Workers From Different Parties Join BJP Ahead Of Lok Sabha Elections

New Delhi: Ahead of the upcoming general elections 2024,...

Arvind Kejriwal’s ED Custody Extended Till April 1

New Delhi: The Rouse Avenue Court in Delhi extended...