From Chaiwala to Chowkidar: Modi's Election Campaigns Online and Offline
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ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 From Chaiwala to Chowkidar: Modi's Election Campaigns Online and Offline RONOJOY SEN Ronojoy Sen ([email protected]) is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies & South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. Vol. 54, Issue No. 51, 28 Dec, 2019 The author is grateful for the assistance provided by Rishabh Srivastava for gathering and visualising the data. In the 2019 Indian general election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi countered corruption charges made by the Indian National Congress's (INC) Rahul Gandhi through the Chowkidar campaign. The author analyses how Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were successfully able to employ the Chowkidar slogan on social media and integrate it with their offline campaign. The Chowkidar campaign and use of social media, the author argues, are a part of Modi’s populist playbook, noting the similarities the most recent campaign has with the BJP’s Chaiwala campaign in the 2014 general election. Though the role of social media in the 2019 Indian general elections has been well documented, its precise impact continues to be debated. This article focuses on election campaigning on Twitter through an analysis of a campaign that centred around corruption charges made by then Indian National Congress President Rahul Gandhi against Prime Minister Narendra Modi—"Chowkidar Chor Hai" (the watchman is a thief). Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) countered this in their own campaign that emphasised the phrase: "Main Bhi Chowkidar" (I am a watchman too). The campaign around chowkidars (watchmen) was an example of a high-impact social media campaign that utilised synergies ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 between online and offline modes of election campaigning. Why Focus on Twitter? Before examining the campaign on Twitter, I would like to clarify why I have chosen to focus on social media, and on Twitter in particular. This clarification is important in light of a recent report by the Lokniti Programme for Comparative Democracy, which argues that the impact of social media on elections in India might be “exaggerated.” According to the report, only 7% of regular social media users were using Twitter on a weekly basis, compared to 27% for Facebook (Lokniti-CSDS-KAS 2019: 7). Moreover, in India, it is estimated that Twitter’s user base is 30 million, which is only 10% of Facebook’s user base (300 million) (Poona and Bansal 2019). I chose to focus on social media and Twitter in particular despite these findings (which can be contested on methodological grounds) for two reasons. First, reports such as the one by the Lokniti underestimate the “second order” effect of digital media, which contributes to the framing of political personalities and the way offline election campaigns are conducted. Digital media has the power to frame agendas since topics that are discussed on social media are often written about by traditional media. This is particularly true of Twitter, which is much more “political” in its content than Facebook or Instagram. For instance, many politicians, most notably Modi, use Twitter to make important announcements, which then become news. Most journalists working for print and television media are also on social media, and their online presence is closely tracked by media organisations, blurring the boundary between traditional and online media. Second, while the electoral impact of social media platforms like Twitter is important, equally significant is the way it contributes to building a politician’s brand and image. As Joyojeet Pal et al (2016: 53) note, “Twitter is at once a means of communication and outlet of political brand signaling for the man who speaks through it.” This is particularly important in Modi’s case since, usually, he has shunned the traditional media and practiced “centralised, one-way messaging” (Pal et al 2016: 60). This also ties in with the “populist” elements of Modi’s politics, where he prefers to speak to the public directly.[3] Third, Twitter still makes data and analytics on a number of parameters accessible through application programming interfaces (APIs) unlike other digital platforms, particularly WhatsApp. Thus, researchers can use Twitter more productively than, for example, Facebook or WhatsApp. While tools, such as Facebook Graph API, can be used to analyse Facebook, this too has become harder in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Bengani 2019). Inside the Chowkidar Campaign Despite the BJP and Modi’s first-mover advantage in the 2014 general election, Rahul Gandhi and the Congress were active on Twitter in the run-up to the 2019 elections, which was held over six weeks in April and May. Importantly, while Modi has far more followers ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 than Gandhi on Twitter—Modi’s count stands at over 50 million compared to Gandhi's count of over 11 million (as of December 2019)—engagement with Gandhi's tweets over the course of 2018 had outstripped engagement with Modi’s tweets. This trend is visualised in Figure 1. Figure 1: Retweets per tweet from January 2018 to December 2018 Source: Twitter[1] and Lok.ai Research However, there was a marked shift in these patterns in 2019. The campaign around "chowkidars" could be seen as an important milestone in the 2019 election in both online and offline campaigns. Modi first mentioned chowkidars in 2013, immediately after being nominated as BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. At a rally, he declared that he would rather be the chowkidar of the nation than its Prime Minister (India Today 2013). However, the Chowkidar trope did not play a significant role in 2014 compared to Modi’s use of the Chaiwala (tea seller) trope (Sen 2016). Indeed, in 2019, there was a clear parallel to the 2014 general election where the Chaiwala jibe against Modi by a senior Congress member was turned into a central element of Modi’s election campaign. At the end of an All India Congress Committee meeting in January 2014, member of Parliament and prominent politician Mani Shankar Aiyar had said, “I promise you in [the] twenty-first century, Narendra Modi will never become prime minister of the country … But if he wants to distribute tea here, we will find a place for him” (Outlook 2014). Aiyar’s comment was made against the backdrop of Modi telling voters at election rallies about his humble background and of having sold tea at railway stations. Aiyar’s remark was immediately hijacked by Modi and his team to initiate events titled “Chai ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 pe Charcha” (discussion over tea). The first event took place in February 2014 and broadcast to about "1,000 tea stalls in 300 cities across the country" (Bhan 2014). Chai pe Charcha was a good example of reaching out to voters using the potent symbolism of Modi’s rise from an underprivileged background. It also exemplifies how well Modi’s team married technology and electoral campaigning. Modi had already been emphasising his origins as a humble chaiwala to distinguish himself from the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty and traditional political elites. As journalist Rajdeep Sardesai (2015: 265) noted, the symbolism was very important: “A tea stall where a potential prime minister sits with his fellow citizens drinking chai – what could be a greater equalizer?" Similarly, towards the end of 2018, Rahul Gandhi, while campaigning for the Assembly elections in Rajasthan, said, "Now a new slogan is rising in India Chowkidar Chor Hai. Modi ji says don't make me the Prime Minister, make me the chowkidar (watchman) of this country. But, after coming to power, the prime minister has betrayed the trust of people" (Business Standard 2018). Gandhi's comments were made in the context of the allegations of corruption by the Indian government around the purchase of high-value fighter jets from France’s Dassault Aviation. As in 2014, Modi countered Gandhi and the Congress by launching his own campaign around the figure of the chowkidar. On 16 March 2019, less than a week after the election had been announced, Modi began his Main Bhi Chowkidar campaign on Twitter with a tweet (Figure 2). As of 26 November 2019, Modi's tweet received around 55,000 retweets and more than 1.5 lakh likes. Figure 2: Modi's Counter-Campaign Your Chowkidar is standing firm & serving the nation. But, I am not alone. Everyone who is fighting corruption, dirt, social evils is a Chowkidar. Everyone working hard for the progress of India is a Chowkidar. Today, every Indian is saying-#MainBhiChowkidar — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 16, 2019 A day later, Modi prefixed the word "Chowkidar" to his Twitter profile (as shown in Figure 3). Other party leaders, including then BJP president Amit Shah, followed suit. Soon the Main Bhi Chowkidar campaign spread like wildfire on social media with “#MainBhiChowkidar” receiving around 15 lakh mentions on Twitter, followed by “#ChowkidarPhirSe” with about 3 lakh mentions. In contrast, the Congress-led ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 “#ChowkidarChorHai” received hardly 1.63 lakh mentions (Rampal 2019). An estimated 20 lakh people added the prefix "Chowkidar" to their Twitter handle, which makes the popularity of Modi’s campaign on social media clear (Punj 2019). Moreover, while an analysis of Modi’s and Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter handles shows that while mention of "chowkidar" was highest for Gandhi and Congress in 2018, for Modi and the BJP it spiked in early 2019. This helped the BJP since its Chowkidar campaign peaked right before the 2019 election and most likely had a greater impact (Figure 4 and 5). Figure 3: Modi's Temporary Twitter Name Figure 4: Percentage of Tweets by Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi that contained a variant of the word Chowkidar ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Source: Twitter and Loki.ai Figure 5: Percentage of Tweets by the official BJP and INC Twitter handles that contained a variant of the word Chowkidar Source: Twitter and Loki.ai Online to Offline The Lokinti study found that among the respondents who were not exposed to social media, nearly half had no knowledge of the "Chowkidar" slogans (Lokniti-CSDS-KAS 2019:41).