Gujarat Assembly elections: Poll panel on toes,parties take the cyber route

While Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s fanpage on Facebook has close to 9,28,780 likes and 9,88,519 followers on Twitter,state Congress president Arjun Modhwadia has 88,969 likes on his Facebook page and 6,200 followers on the microblogging site.

Both maintain personal blogs,stage managed by an array of content writers and agencies,which leads one to ask just how important the social media juggernaut is to the political class in the state?

Songwriter and adman Prasoon Joshi says,“Social media has a reach in creating an atmosphere but it has no direct impact on actual votes. As Internet penetration is still low in our country,absolute reach through social media is not there. Conventional media has always been more important. But conventional media is increasingly overlapping with the social media these days. Social media creates more touch points for parties to be accessible to people. Brands are made not on how much you communicate but what you communicate and how much you propagate new thinking.”

As the Model Code of Conduct is in place,parties’ ads and smear campaigns are not visible in the electronic and and print media. So they are finding their way on social networking sites and blogrolls of politicians.

“Social media is an emerging media and we have made sure that we have a strong presence on the same. As a party,we have given a lot of importance to this tool as we find that a lot of youth and women are active on the same. We recently launched a Facebook page,Join Hands for Change,which 30,000 people have joined. We also launched five songs sung by an array of stellar Gujarati singers,which has been downloaded and liked by people” said Modhwadia.

If the Congress in banking on songs,Modi has penned Garba poems,which “will be used during Navratri by his fans”. “He (Modi) has actually gone one step forward and connected to the common man by having a ‘write to CM,invite him for an event and request and appointment on his website’. His reach is palpable as even the Google Hangout of (US President) Barack Obama never crashed,but Google executives had to try hard to revive Modi’s Hangout because it crashed due to the sheer numbers of people trying to access it. His social media presence is huge and he is so meticulous that he even takes a printout of people’s reactions each day and goes through it,” said Rajika Kacheria,convenor of BJP’s Information Technology Cell.

While Modi became only the third politician after Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gilliard to do a Google Hangout,the state Congress came out with the Join Hands for Change movement to bring out “true facts and figures” relating to the claims made by the CM during his Google Hangout session.

“Congress’s ‘Missing’ campaign plays a vital role in the movement… Each fact has been compiled after a thorough research,” said a source close to the development,adding that a few videos have been posted on the website,which “talk about flaws in the Google Hangout conducted by the CM”. “The facts given by him were different from those furnished by the state and national census report,” added the source.

Media pundits feel that though only 30 of the total 182 Assembly seats have urban voters,parties are riding on the fact that the economics of social media are not yet under the purview of EC.

“We have a media team that monitors expenditure of the candidates closely. A candidate’s expenditure should not exceed Rs 16 lakh. There is no limit on the spends by a party apart from the mandate that they must not violate the code of conduct. We have not yet decided any laws with respect to the social media,but we do monitor the content that goes out on FM radio and cable television channels,” said state Chief Electoral Officer Anita Karwal.