The Communication Review

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcrv20

Was the 2019 Indian election won by digital

media?

Dr. Taberez A. Neyazi & Ralph Schroeder

To cite this article: Dr. Taberez A. Neyazi & Ralph Schroeder (2021): Was the
2019 Indian election won by digital media?, The Communication Review, DOI:
10.1080/10714421.2021.1933311

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2021.1933311

Published online: 23 Jun 2021.

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THE COMMUNICATION REVIEW
https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2021.1933311

Was the 2019 Indian election won by digital media?

Dr. Taberez A. Neyazi, PhDa and Ralph Schroeder b

a
Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore; bOxford
Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Research on the reasons for the unexpected outcome of the Campaigns; election; digital
2019 national election in India can be divided into two strands: media; disinformation; India
one strand examines the election without recourse to media,
arguing that the appeals by parties to different segments of the
population, referred to as identity politics, swayed voters. The
other strand has made the case that media campaigns, and
digital media in particular, were decisive in shaping the electoral
outcome. Among the explanations that focus on media, these
can be further subdivided into those that make the case for
traditional media still playing a more important role than online
media, and others that argue that digital media, and perhaps
even online disinformation, played a key role. In this paper, we
analyze the evidence for these competing accounts, drawing on
the available evidence. We argue that an explanation based on
combining elements from both strands, plus the interaction
between digital media and traditional media and offline mobi­
lization, together explain Modi’s unanticipated election victory.

Introduction
The role of digital media in elections has been subject of extensive academic
debates. But the growing body of literature that analyzes the relationship
between digital media and election outcomes has offered mixed evidence.
While some studies show that social media can help the party and the
candidate to win elections (Gainous & Wagner, 2013; Kruikemeier, 2014),
others disagree and argue that the effect of social media on actual election
outcomes is at best is minimal (Strandberg, 2013; see also Sides, Tesler, &
Vavreck, 2018, for the US 2016 election). Yet other studies argue that despite
the rise of digital media, traditional media continue to play an important role
in influencing election results (Casero-Ripollés, Feenstra, & Tormey, 2016).
These sharply contrasting views about how digital media relate to election
outcomes may be due to the fact that election campaigns often deploy an array
of strategies that include grassroots campaigns in addition to using both
traditional and digital media to reach out to voters. Research has no doubt
advanced our understanding of how digital media affect elections in Western

CONTACT Dr. Taberez A. Neyazi, PhD taberez@nus.edu.sg Department of Communications and New Media
National University of Singapore AS6, #03-11, 11 Computing Drive Singapore 11741
© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 T. A. NEYAZI AND R. SCHROEDER

democracies. Outside Western democracies, and for India in particular, how­

ever, there is limited analysis of digital media and elections.
This paper examines the role of media during the 2019 national election in
India, focusing on the success of prime minister Narendra Modi’s campaign. It
takes a holistic view of media rather than looking at individual media and
compares digital media with traditional media and how they interact with
grassroots campaigns. The paper not only contributes to the theoretical
debates about the role of digital media in election campaigns, but also provides
evidence from a non-Western context. The paper is based primarily on the
analysis of secondary data but also synthesizes a wide range of perspectives on
media and campaign dynamics in the world’s most complex democracy. The
argument in the conclusion of the paper will be that a combination of factors,
and especially how digital media translated into traditional media, plus
strengthened offline mobilization backed by populist support, provides the
most convincing explanation of Modi’s electoral success.
The paper is organized as follows: first we provide the background by giving
an overview of India’s media and political systems. Next, we discuss digital
media and how they are used for election campaigns, including the populist
style whereby populists use digital media to challenge the elite establishment
(including the party establishment) and its entrenched media position. Then,
we provide further background with Modi’s election victory in 2014. Once we
have done this, we can turn to the digital media campaign itself with a focus on
the 2019 elections, which we subdivide by the different platforms (Facebook,
Twitter, etc). One peculiarity is how Modi used celebrities in his digital media
campaign, and we discuss this briefly before we discuss the role played by
disinformation. This allows us to turn finally to the role of voters, how they
were mobilized on the ground, and how they were swayed. Our conclusion
compares our argument with other explanations of his electoral success and
draws out lessons for the future.

The Indian media and political systems

The Indian media system is highly complex and diverse and does not fit neatly
into the framework developed by Hallin and Mancini (2004). Placing India
within Hallin and Mancini’s schema, it can be noted that there has been
a strong tradition of public service broadcasting and high newspaper reader­
ship until the 1980s, but since then there has been a proliferation of private
channels and the public service has shrunk to a small audience share. In
addition to the national media in English and Hindi there is also a growing
number of vernacular language news outlets (Neyazi, 2014, Neyazi, 2018). This
diversity of newspapers and news channels in 14 major Indian languages
reflects not only linguistic diversity but also regional and cultural diversity.
When scholars analyze the Indian media system as a whole, they tend to focus
 THE COMMUNICATION REVIEW 3

on specific media such as television news (Chakravartty & Roy, 2013). But at
this national level, it is also the case that although there are media that claim
neutrality, the elite English-language press is also alleged to have a bias toward
a left-liberal ideology that overlooks the interests of the larger audience of the
vernacular masses (Neyazi, 2018). Recent decades have also seen the emer­
gence of English-language news channels such as Republic TV and Hindi news
channels such as Sudarshan TV that are overtly partisan and that have a large
audience reach (Republic TV is the largest single channel). Moreover, some
Indian states have had partisan media systems for some time (Roy &
Chakraborty, 2013), and there are important differences between the North
and South of the country in this regard. Still, the growth of this partisan media
system at the national level has accelerated since the 2014 election, and the
emergence of the right-wing BJP as a dominant political party at the national
and state levels has thus been bolstered by the emergence of a system in which
media neither support nor oppose the ruling party. It is against this back­
ground that we need to understand both the 2014 and 2019 national election
campaigns and their relationship with news media.

Digital media, campaigns, and voting in India

When considering the impact of media on elections, we can begin with the
idea that elections have become increasingly mediatized (Hjarvard, 2008). But
while mediatization theory correctly highlights that the media themselves play
an increasing and autonomous role, as with the prominent role of journalists
or the mounting ritualization of certain election-related formats, digital media
have also had the opposite effect, expanding the role of media outside of
established channels and enabling more direct contact between voters and
parties or candidates. An example of the latter is engagement in India of
armies (or “cells”) of paid and voluntary workers via social media campaigns,
often to increase the reach of negative campaign messages. And while there is
still a dominant agenda in the national news cycle, the parties’ media cam­
paigns have become more adept at “spin” and promoted voter turnout but also
targeted specific voter groups via social media. These changes are nowhere
more visible than in India which has witnessed rapid growth of digital media
even as the role of traditional media has, as we shall see, remained resilient.
Before the internet, mobile phones had already played an important role in
political mobilization. The successful election campaign in 2007 of Mayawati
to become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous state,
marked a point of departure in this regard. In the campaign, as Doron and
Jeffrey (2013, 143–, p. 64) have documented, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party
(BSP) made use of mobile phones to coordinate getting out the vote. It can be
added that the BSP emerged as a party supported by Dalits (formerly known as
untouchables) and Mayawati herself had risen from a humble Dalit
4 T. A. NEYAZI AND R. SCHROEDER

background. One more noteworthy feature of this campaign was that the
major newspapers and television channels during this campaign were domi­
nated by Hindu upper caste elites that were disdainful toward Dalit claims to
political representation. This theme, whereby digital media are used to cir­
cumvent traditional media, will be prominent in what follows.
A complete review of the literature on (digital) media, and electoral politics
in India is beyond the scope here, but we can focus on work that bears closely
on the 2019 election and Modi’s success. In relation to social media and
politics in India, one of the first incidents to gain widespread attention via
Twitter, mainly on smartphones, was the Delhi gang rape that took place in
December 2012. In response to this event, many activists and journalists went
online, and succeeded in drawing far more attention to the event than tradi­
tional media would have done. However, this attention was confined to a small
and urban internet-savvy part of the population (Belair-Gagnon, Mishra, &
Agur, 2014). Digital media received greater attention for the first time with
Modi’s campaign in 2014 to become prime minister. The 2014 Indian election
was dubbed the first “internet election.” As mentioned, Modi, like Donald
Trump, used Twitter in particular to circumvent opposition to his candidacy
from within his own party and from the media, in Modi’s case especially the
elite English-language media. Modi also relied more heavily on vernacular
languages, and especially Hindi, as Neyazi (2018) has demonstrated. Further,
like Trump, Modi used Twitter in 2014, as in 2019, to attack and disparage his
opponents, and especially Rahul Gandhi, the former president of the Congress
party. And attacks online are, of course, not just restricted to Modi’s campaign:
Punathambekar (2015), for example, has given an account of the humorous
and satirical videos that went viral during the 2014 election. He also notes, as
do Ahmed, Jaidka, and Cho (2016) discussed in a moment, that during
election times, video, and also television, takes on a political role that is unlike
during non-election times. These accounts show the emergence of a more
complex media and communication environments and strategies, which are
deployed by political parties and candidates to micro-target different segments
of voters.

The 2014 election and Modi’s online challenger advantage

The elite-bias perception of Indian news media led Modi to extensively use
digital media during the 2014 national election. Several studies have shown
that the BJP and Modi’s campaign was able to dominate the media agenda and
receive more coverage than the Congress party (Neyazi, 2018). As mentioned
already, Modi used Twitter in particular to circumvent not only what he
perceived as an elite media establishment but also to circumvent his own
party, which initially opposed his nomination as its prime ministerial candi­
date. In this way, Modi could get his message out to his supporters and to have
 THE COMMUNICATION REVIEW 5

these, often aggressively anti-establishment, messages conveyed to a wider

public when his tweets and speeches were covered in traditional channels
(Schroeder, 2018a, 2018b). Modi was not the only one to benefit from Twitter,
as shown in the study by Ahmed et al. (2016). The study by the Center for
Media Studies (2014), which was based on a content analysis of five major
news channels, showed that both Narendra Modi and the BJP received much
more airtime/coverage as compared to other leaders such as Rahul Gandhi and
his Congress party and Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). It can
be noted, however, that for the state legislative election in Delhi in 2015,
Kejriwal’s success is also thought to have benefitted from a strong digital
media campaign: we discuss this further below.
In the Lok Sabha election campaign in the spring of 2014, the BJP leader,
who also had many more media appearances, held rallies across the country,
and in general ran a far more active campaign than the Congress Party and its
leader. Narendra Modi did an average of five campaign events per day, flying
by helicopter from one to the next while crowdsourcing topics for his speeches
on Twitter (Price, 2015). According to India Today, Modi, through his multi-
faceted campaigns that included rallies, road shows, 3D hologram appearances
at simultaneous rallies in 53 cities on 10 April and making direct phone calls to
citizens on their mobiles, contacted about 18 times more voters than Mr
Gandhi (nearly 234 million voters compared with Gandhi’s 13.3 million)
(Pradhan and Mahurkar, 2014). We can already see here the importance of
the “ground campaign”, which it will be important not to overlook later when
we come to the 2019 election.
The use of digital media in the 2014 election campaigns has been reported
in several studies. Using a large random sample of Tweets from major political
parties during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Ahmed et al. (2016) found that
the internet played an important part in the BJP’s success, particularly among
the first-time voters. The Aam Aadmi (or common man) Party (AAP), a new
party, had the next greatest Twitter presence, though it failed to get an
electoral dividend (but did so during the 2015 state legislative elections, as
mentioned). Still, party contact face-to-face and by phone were the two most
important predictors of political engagement during the 2014 election, more
so than online media attention, as Neyazi, Kumar, and Semetko (2016) study
found, based on a survey of three urban areas. Pal, Mistree, and Madhani
(2018) examined Modi’s media strategy in the 2014 national election and
noted that his fervent Hindu nationalist appeal via digital media was stronger
before he began campaigning. Once the campaign had begun and even more
so after he had become prime minister, he had to become more inclusive of all
faiths. And since being office, Modi has regularly tweeted greetings during the
religious holidays and festivals of other religions.
The strategic and creative use of public relations and Twitter by Modi has
also been noted in various studies. Pal, Chandra, and Vydiswaran (2016) have
6 T. A. NEYAZI AND R. SCHROEDER

shown how Modi enhanced his standing by posing with Indian spiritual
leaders and Bollywood and cricket stars. To run a successful campaign, the
party depends on dedicated followers who need to be motivated. On this front,
Modi’s campaign was far ahead of his rivals. In their study, Pal et al. (2016)
offer an account of the use of Twitter by Modi to motivate ground troops, the
RSS (the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), a Hindu extreme right-wing nation­
alist volunteer organization (see Andersen & Damle, 2018). When Modi
mentioned his RSS followers in tweets, they were pleased and energized.
This selective use of tagging followers on Twitter galvanized supporters to
work harder in the hope of getting noticed by their leader.
Bajaj’s (2017) analysis of the coded “frames” of Modi’s tweets during the
2014 election campaign shows, however, that there were few tweets containing
the Hindu nationalist message of the BJP; instead, they mostly promoted the
agenda of economic development. This finding was also supported by Jaffrelot
(2015), who has labeled Modi’s campaign “high- tech populism”, referring to
the focus of the campaign on “digital India” and economic development and
aimed at a younger urban elite. He has been compared to other populist
leaders in the study by Gonawela et al. (2020). The Anointed Son, The Hired
Gun, and the Chai Wala: Enemies and Insults in Politicians’ Tweets in the
Run-Up to the 2019 Indian General Elections. In Proceedings of the 53rd
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) (pp. 2878–
2887), who examined the tweets of Modi, Trump, Geert Wilders (Holland)
and Nigel Farage (UK) over a period of several months during the respective
elections of these right-wing populists. They found that Trump’s tweets are far
more negative than Modi’s and that Trump tweeted more personal insults and
personal criticisms. Modi also used more wordplay in his tweets and more
group insults, for example, by bundling criticisms about several Congress
politicians or the Gandhi family into one tweet. Once he had been elected,
however, Pal (2015) argues that “most of Modi’s tweets, have become banal,
feel-good messages, shout-outs to major events and popular figures, and nods
to partnerships and affiliations” (p. 386). This finding was further supported
through a content analysis of Modi’s Tweets from when he began his account
in 2009 until 2015 (Pal et al., 2017). The most important finding is the
disappearance of Modi’s sarcastic attacks from his Tweets and the presence
of more positive and aspirational messages once he became prime minister.
Several other studies have also focused on the interaction between tradi­
tional and new media in setting the news agenda. In their study, Chakraborty,
Pal, Chandra, and Romero (2018) showed the extent to which Modi’s tweets
could enter traditional media from 2009 until 2015. They found that his tweets
became more newsworthy over time, especially in the last phase of the 2014
election campaigns and even more so once he became prime minister. And
tweets with certain themes like political and celebrity callouts are also more
newsworthy than other themes like “development” or “foreign visits.” The
 THE COMMUNICATION REVIEW 7

authors argue that social media are not used as a tool to disseminate news;
instead, news now originate in social media and therefore get attention in
traditional media. Similarly, Neyazi (2018) showed that despite the fact that
only a small fraction of Indians were online in 2014, public sentiment scores
derived from Twitter and Facebook were regularly published on the front
pages of many English and vernacular newspapers and websites of TV news
channels. Thus people who were not online were getting the information
about the social media campaigns activities through the traditional media,
which reflects the emergence of a media system combining the logic of both
new and traditional media via a translation of the former into the latter (see
also Schroeder, 2018b).
Importantly, we cannot ignore the integration of populist style of Modi with
his digital media campaigns. Like Trump, toward the end of the 2014 cam­
paign Modi attacked not just his political opponents but also established elites
and presented himself as an outside challenger, both features typical of
a populist political communication style (Moffitt, 2017). The main thrust of
his campaign, of course, and again emblematic of his populism, was his appeal
to his Hindu nationalist base, as documented by Udupa (2015). Udupa also
describes offline meetings of Hindu nationalist supporters, such as the “Global
Patriotic Tweeples Meet” in Mumbai, which gave rise to hashtags that trended
for several days. Udupa (2016) also describes online efforts to rewrite history
along Hindu nationalist lines. Along similar lines, Sinha (2017) notes that
Modi’s attacks on the media partly stem from the criticisms he received early
on over his involvement in the Gujarat riot incident in 2002, leading to BJP
attacks on “presstitutes”, a derogatory term that combines two words – press
and prostitutes. Govil and Baishya (2018) also note this aggressive tone outside
of traditional media. They point out that the RSS never communicates via
traditional media, but these Modi supporters are highly active using digital
media, including disseminating videos that feature Modi and Hindu nation­
alist themes. The Hindu right is thus active on social media and on the ground,
and this hybrid orchestration between campaigns and non-election mobiliza­
tions deserves to be investigated further.1

The 2019 election background

In 2019, there continued to be an urban-rural digital divide in internet access
in India (Tenhunen, 2018). Yet political parties have increasingly turned to
digital tools to promote their messages. Whereas Indian elections used to be
based on client–patron relationships (but see Chhibber & Verma, 2018), in
recent elections and with the growth of the middle class, there has been a shift
1
It must be noted that Modi has also started a monthly radio program called Mann Ki Baat (“Speaking your mind”), to
reach out to vernacular masses. Since its inception in October 2014, Mann Ki Baat has been able to draw attention
from both urban and rural audiences as well as generating large advertising revenue (See Venugopal, 2018).
8 T. A. NEYAZI AND R. SCHROEDER

to the promise of upward economic mobility and India’s global rise, though as
we shall see, caste, region, and religion are still central. And although the BJP
had an advantage in its early start in using digital tools, by 2019 the Indian
National Congress (popularly known as the Congress party) could have
equally made use of smartphones which had become widely available by
then. The Congress party made limited use of social media in the 2014 Lok
Sabha (national parliament) election, but by 2019 it had created a Data
Analytics Department, headed by Praveen Chakravarty, a former investment
banker. It is true that the BJP vastly outspent Congress party on social media,
but aside from money, this advantage is mainly an organizational one, with the
BJP’s small central team in Delhi able to engage millions of “social media
volunteers” around the country (Sardesai, 2020: 226–7, 232–3).
Just before the 2019 Lok Sabha election took place, the Reuters Institute
released the digital news report for India in March 2019. One limitation of the
report was that it was based on an urban sample. Still, an important finding
was that the majority of respondents identified with the BJP. Out of 1013
respondents, nearly 501 respondents identified with the BJP while 232 respon­
dents identified with the UPA (the United Progressive Alliance, led by the
Congress party) and only 282 respondents were still non-committal about
their choice or indicated that they were not going to vote in the general
election. The survey reveals that the BJP already had a decisive lead compared
to other political parties in terms of support among the online population, but
it would also need to sway the rural population that was reachable only via
vernacular languages and grassroots mobilization.
In any event, the Modi-led BJP adopted a comprehensive media strategy
which sought to reach not only an online audience but simultaneously set the
agenda for traditional media and mobilized grassroots campaigns. Studies of
voting behavior, which we will discuss below, often ignore the role of media,
however. Apart from very few studies such as Verma and Sardesai (2014),
media have not featured in the empirical research on Indian elections (we will
discuss the exceptions shortly).

The digital campaign in the 2019 election

Modi’s image after the 2014 election was of an accessible and publicly engaged
prime minister. At the same time, he has insulated himself from probing
questions by journalists by hardly having any press conferences, unlike all
previous prime ministers. His message could be summarized as “make India
great again”, or more precisely to suggest that he is making India great again.
His campaign was highly centered on his person and his leadership as opposed
to his party, which was in the background. When the 2019 election campaign
began, the traditional news media coverage concentrated on the horse race
between the main leadership candidates. Research from the US suggests that
 THE COMMUNICATION REVIEW 9

voters are attracted to horse race news rather than substantial issues (Iyengar,
Norpoth, & Hahn, 2004). We also know that the BJP spent the bulk of its
advertising resources on television: in the run-up to elections in five Indian
states in December 2018, the BJP had the single largest spend from among all
advertisers in November, ahead of Netflix and Trivago (Anand, 2018, see also
the documentation of election spending at https://adrindia.org). Meanwhile,
digital media, apart from playing the role of advertising tools, spread satirical
messages and provided means for supporters to rally each other and denigrate
the opposition.
As during the 2014 election campaign, Modi’s strategy was to deliver
a series of interviews to news channels just before each phase of the polling,
videos of which were then shared on social media platforms. Hence, the digital
campaign of BJP and Modi needs to be understood within the larger context of
an online campaign that was played out on multiple social media to reach
wider audiences more effectively. Whether Modi posted himself or not, his
form of address on Facebook and Twitter is and was personal: he spoke with
his own accessible voice, and the posts were a mixture of Hindi and English
and other languages to suit visits to particular states.

Facebook
On Facebook, Modi had 43 million followers in December 2018. He regularly
posted videos, but his posts also used more informal speech, closer to spoken
language, without the constraint of being confined to the 280 characters of
Twitter (though in practice, the text is often shorter, used for labeling or
commenting on images and video or to pose questions). The comments and
replies both praise and criticize him. Interestingly, all text in Hindi has
a translation button next to it. The posts in this case, unlike for Instagram
and YouTube but similar to Twitter, follow a temporal order. But the posts,
including photos and videos, are again mainly of the public relations type.
Hindu nationalist themes are subtle rather than overt. His Facebook posts also
included information about his campaigns, rallies, meetings and interviews.

Twitter
Modi had 44+ million followers on Twitter in December 2018, and this has also
been his most political channel. There are more speeches here than on
YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, though ceremonies and official visits are
also featured. But on Twitter, Modi emphasizes his own achievements more
and he also chides his political opponents. The more inclusive and less antag­
onistic tone since he became prime minister was discussed above. But it is not
only Modi on Twitter: The BJP and their politicians also dominated Twitter
with the largest number of most followed politicians; 228 out of 500 (Pal &
10 T. A. NEYAZI AND R. SCHROEDER

Panda, 2019). Yet the BJP and Modi also know the limitations of Twitter as an
elite medium and spent a very limited amount on advertising on this platform.
This was in contrast to the Congress party, which spent a large amount of
money on advertising on Twitter as compared to Facebook. In fact, Congress
spent nine times more money than the BJP on Twitter advertising (Mehrotra,
2019). This also highlights how different political parties prioritized different
digital social media to reach out to different groups of voters.

WhatsApp

The 2019 Indian election was dubbed the first “WhatsApp” election. Yet the
study of WhatsApp is difficult because this is a private means of communica­
tion. According to one report, the BJP had at least three WhatsApp groups for
each polling booth (Uttam, 2018). This was a replication of the strategies that
the BJP deployed during the 2017 Uttar Pradesh (UP) state assembly elections.
The study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which followed 1400
public groups and analyzed 1. 09 million messages during the campaign period
throws some interesting light on this (Bengani, 2019): The study revealed that
text messages constituted 45% of the overall content, while images, links and
videos together accounted for 52% of the total content shared among those
groups. The most widely shared messages were largely inflammatory with the
intention of mobilizing support for the BJP. Among the top ten shared
messages, there was only one message that aimed at mobilizing support for
the Congress party. These findings are complementary to a qualitative study by
Sinha (2017) based on observation of five groups and dominated by Modi
supporters. Sinha observed that many exchanges revolve around jokes and
cartoons, personalized attacks on Modi’s opponents disparaging their looks
and intelligence, and praise for Modi’s achievements. Substantive exchanges
about politics are short-circuited by saying that these are too serious or too
political for this forum.

Instagram
On Instagram, Modi had almost 16 million followers in December 2018. Many
of the Instagram photography and videos he posted received around a million
likes and thousands of comments. Unlike other digital media, the emphasis on
Instagram is on pleasing images: ceremonies, meetings with leaders, visits to
important sites, yoga and the daily routines of the prime minister’s life – all
presented with colorful and appealing and tasteful pictures. The themes here,
even more so than on YouTube, rise above politics. Since there is no text (apart
from speeches, but they are more ceremonial, and there are fewer political
rallies than on his Facebook account), the emphasis is on presenting
a thoughtful and caring leader.
 THE COMMUNICATION REVIEW 11

Celebrity politics
In order to expand his social support base, Modi has used celebrities more
strategically than seen before in Indian politics. Even when he was a chief
minister, Modi has engaged with celebrities and public figures for campaign­
ing. For example, in the wake of 2012 Gujarat Assembly election, Modi
organized a Google hangout session with netizens, which was hosted by
famous film actor Ajay Devgn. While this was the first time that an Indian
politician used live video-chat to engage with the online audience, what was
most important was the use of a film actor to host the session (see Press Trust
of India (PTI), 2012). Such engagement and outreach often made the headlines
in traditional media, leading to much wider reach. While in the past, politi­
cians have kept the engagement with celebrities to formal events such as award
ceremonies and fund raising (Pal, 2019), Modi created new political capital by
not only engaging with celebrities but making such engagement part of his
public persona. For example, soon after meeting celebrities, Modi often tweets
a picture with celebrities and posts it on Facebook and Instagram. Since
celebrities have many more followers, this helps in creating a positive image
of the politician in the eyes of ordinary citizens and dominates the news
agenda. Moreover, the companionship of celebrities is often perceived by the
celebrity’s fans as an endorsement, which may ultimately sway voting
decisions.

The role of disinformation

Like other democracies, India has witnessed the growing circulation of online
disinformation. The Reuters Institute India Digital News report, published just
before the Lok Sabha election, showed that 57% of respondents were worried
about whether online news they come across is real or fake (Aneez et al., 2019).
Das and Schroeder (2020) have documented, using interviews, how people
from various walks of life, were both worried about disinformation in early
2019 but also highly aware of how this was affecting them and the country at
large. The growing circulation of disinformation particularly on social media
like WhatsApp also became a central concern for the Indian government,
which formally asked the company in late 2018 to take measures to check the
spread of disinformation (Neyazi et al., 2021). WhatsApp adopted several such
steps, including limiting the number of forwards to ensure that disinformation
should not spread at a large scale. The Oxford Internet Institute’s (OII) study
also found that WhatsApp was used widely by all political parties to spread
disinformation (Campbell-Smith & Bradshaw, 2019).
Along similar lines, Facebook removed pages linked to the ruling party, BJP
and the opposition party, INC, which were responsible for spreading junk
news (Campbell-Smith & Bradshaw, 2019). According to Facebook, there were
12 T. A. NEYAZI AND R. SCHROEDER

a total of 687 pages and accounts linked to the IT cell of the INC, while 15
pages and accounts were linked to the BJP. The amount of advertising on
Facebook for the BJP was 70,000 USD (INR 48.5 lakh) while the INC spent
39,000 USD (INR 26.9 lakh) (Thaker, 2019). The BJP thus spent almost
double. There were also many fact-checking organizations both independently
and in collaboration with social media organizations that were regularly
exposing fake online news. The OII study noted, for example, that because
of the lack of content moderation, the NaMo app was used by propagandists or
campaign consultancies. These include The India Eye, one of the most active
accounts on this app, which was responsible for 40% of 744 posts on NaMo’s
default feed. The study also found a link between the India Eye and Silver
Touch, another campaign consultancy, both of which were responsible for
running several fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram.

Voters and the role of social media in the 2019 election

There is one analysis which has sought an account of the role of social media
based on a representative sample of the population, the Center for the Study of
Developing Society (CSDS)’s report (2019). This report points out that 2/3 of
Indians did not use social media at all and most said that television, followed
by newspapers, was their main source of news about the election. Only a small
proportion (3%) said that social media were the main source. The findings also
show, however, that social media have grown, with Facebook, WhatsApp and
YouTube reaching approximately a third of Indians and Instagram and
Twitter approximately a sixth, while in 2014, Twitter reached only 2% and
Facebook 9% (p.12, table 1.1). What the CSDS also reports is that social media
users where highly engaged: for example, about a quarter used social media in
2019 to share or forward political views, read news or express political views
daily or sometimes, and another 13–15% rarely did so (p.20, figure 1.5). Of
course, social media is still dominated by upper caste, highly educated urba­
nites and men, with the gap only narrowing slowly. Yet Indians were also wary
of social media: One in four, regardless of whether they used social media, did
not trust the medium (p.49), a finding also supported by another study
(Zeenab et al., 2019). Still, the BJP did not do better among social media
users than among non social media users (p.54–57) and these BJP social media
users were also not likely to vote more, though they were more likely partici­
pate in campaigning and in election rallies (p.61). However, apart from this
last point about participation, the report does not say anything about how
social media influenced the success or otherwise of digital campaigns or their
influence on the news agenda.
 THE COMMUNICATION REVIEW 13

Ground wars
The grassroots campaign of the Modi-led BJP, aspects of which have already
been discussed in passing, was more powerful compared to other parties. The
BJP not only had more rallies and extensive door-to-door campaigns but also
mobilized a large number of booth-level workers and groups who were in
direct touch with the voters. These ground level workers are by now part of the
campaign strategies of most of the political parties, but the BJP has a very well-
developed structure for coordinating booth-level workers. In 2019, India
operated at more than 1 million booths where over 900 million eligible voters
cast their votes. In order to mobilize party workers at the grassroots, PM Modi
launched “Mera Booth Sabse Mazboot” (my polling booth, the strongest)
campaign in September 2018 while addressing the party workers through
the NamoApp (Press Trust of India. (PTI), 2018). In order to galvanize
booth level workers, PM Modi interacted with 10 million booth-level workers
though a video-conference on 28 February, 2019. The BJP’s focus on booth-
level workers not only demonstrates the importance of grassroots campaigns
but also shows how technology is embedded effectively to mobilize foot
soldiers who are the main conduits of the party’s campaigns strategies.
While booth-level workers have always been the bulwark of party campaigns,
the BJP deployed and coordinated these workers more systematically in the
2014 Lok Sabha election. During the 2014 campaign, booth level workers were
mobilized and coordinated by means of mobile phones. In 2019, the BJP and
other parties used the mobile app WhatsApp for such coordination which had
already been effectively used in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) state assembly election
in 2017, where the BJP won with a three-fourth majority. According to one
report, there were almost 9000 WhatsApp groups that the BJP IT cell in UP
had access to, while each of those groups had an average of 150 members.
According to this strategy, the BJP was able to reach to an average of
1.35 million people every day through WhatsApp group (Bhardwaj, 2017).
These workers were then encouraged to pass the message to those who did not
have access to the internet. This micro-targeting of voters and the combination
of online and offline strategies has placed the BJP’s campaign strategies far
ahead of its rival. Research from the US has shown that grassroots campaigns
still play a crucial role in mobilizing voters (Nielsen, 2012).

Why people voted for Modi

There have been a number of studies of why people voted for Modi – quite
apart from the role of media in the election. Jaffrelot (2019) says that while the
BJP was a middle or upper class party in 2014, by 2019, its appeal had widened
such that class no longer plays a role. Yet the BJP has also consolidated its role
as a Hindu party and it has also had less support among minority faiths
14 T. A. NEYAZI AND R. SCHROEDER

(Sardesai, 2019). Suri (2019) goes further and argues that whereas the
Congress party relied on caste during elections, the BJP appealed to national­
ism and development across class and caste divisions and also extended its
appeal to lower strata. Maiorano (2019) similarly shows increased support for
the BJP among the rural population, and Deshpande, Tillin, and Kailash
(2019), like Maiorano, point out that increased benefits from welfare schemes
(such as pensions, sanitation, cooking gas) may have widened the BJP’s appeal
downwards. They also argue that the BJP pointed to how welfare had in fact
already been provided to the “undeserving” under previous Congress govern­
ments, but that the BJP instead claimed that it wanted to achieve more
universal welfare benefits. Jaffrelot (2019) argues that “Modi is perceived by
the poor, not only as one of them who is defending them against the rich . . .
but as a man they can trust and who cares for them . . . and protect their
country against the external threats” (p.158).
Both Jaffrelot (2019) and Suri (2019) also point out, however, that the
election was highly dependent on Modi the person rather than the party,
and that his future support will depend on his ability to continue to deliver
benefits. This personalization of politics whereby leadership appeal is more
influential than parties that has been a feature of Presidential systems has also
now been found in various parliamentary democracies and is thought to have
been facilitated by media (Bennett, 2012; Mughan, 2000). The same trend
applies to Indian democracy, and what we can see is that, whatever role played
by the media, Modi’s appeal is among Indians of all stripes, except among non-
Hindus. Similarly, the demand for a strong leader grows during the time of
a crisis. Since the time Modi came to power, he has been projecting the nation
in crisis – 60 years of misgovernance and underdevelopment bestowed by the
previous governments (particularly the Congress party). These criticisms have
been emphasized throughout his campaigns, and they were heightened to an
extreme with the killing of 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel in an
attack after a militant drove an explosive-laden vehicle into a bus in Pulwama,
Jammu and Kashmir. This event was dramatized in the media as a major crisis
and an assault on Indian democracy (Vijayan & Drennan, 2020). The resultant
airstrike to revenge the killing of Indian officers, which took place on
26 February, was portrayed as a triumph made possible because of a strong
leader. Many reputable media houses went on to attribute the successful
airstrike to PM Modi in addition to circulating misinformation about it
(Vijayan & Drennan, 2020). The media has thus played a vital role in the
personalization of politics, helping Modi to gain traction among the voters.

Conclusion
It is worth bearing in mind in what follows that pollsters and the media and
the wider public all expected Modi and the BJP to do worse in the 2019
 THE COMMUNICATION REVIEW 15

election than in 2014, especially following a series of wins by the Congress

party in state elections in late 2018. Thus, pundits and others thought that the
BJP would lose power in the sense that the party would be forced to form
a coalition government. The opposite happened. With hindsight, it can be seen
that Modi’s campaign gave him overwhelming advantages: His agenda domi­
nated the media, including having a far greater share of television airtime than
Rahul Gandhi and his opponents (Sardesai, 2020, p. 206), but also due to his
negative campaign attacks on the opposition plus the whipping up of nation­
alist sentiment after the Pulwama attack and Balakot airstrikes against
Pakistan.
We have argued that the media environment was conducive to lively
contestation, split especially along the lines of opposition to Modi in elite
English-language media versus a juggernaut Modi campaign on all levels, but
especially on the ground and in vernacular languages and in aggressive
negative social media campaigns. Sharma (2020) has documented that the
BJP used professional campaign organizations and has had much stronger
such organizations in place ever since the election in 2014. Moreover, as just
noted, Modi could convince a wider portion of the public that he was cham­
pioning their interests against a party that still represents a corrupt and self-
serving establishment. Modi therefore did not simply win the media cam­
paign: his political program, populism, which has moved away from a caste-
based clientelism and toward an anti-secular exclusionary Hindutva politics,
also resonated with a broader electorate.
Still, media no doubt gave him an overwhelming advantage: not only did he
enjoy a far wider reach among all the types of media, especially in vernacular
language media, but he could also mobilize his troops on social media to
spread aggressively negative messages and to get out the vote locally. Such
a comprehensive advantage should have been predicted; the fact that it did not
highlights how both political and especially digital media strategies have
moved elections into new directions. Among the lessons are that new political
thinking, but also new thinking about how to effectively utilize new digital
media during elections, is required.
Another implication is that it is time to revisit some classical political
communication theory to understand media uses and their effects on elec­
tions. Since the time of the Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) seminal “two step Flow”
model of personal influence, the myth of direct effect of media on voting
behavior has been questioned. And several empirical studies in the context of
the US and Europe that have shown limited effects of the media on voting
behavior (Finkel, 1993; Hillygus & Jackman, 2003; McGuire, 1986). Media at
best can have a reinforcing effect on voter’s decisions since the most trusted
information citizens received about politics is through friends, relatives and
community members. In the current context, the main advances in campaign­
ing can be found in digital communication technologies, which reshape these
16 T. A. NEYAZI AND R. SCHROEDER

close-by influences. The “two-step flow” model is thus getting re-channeled

whereby groups interact online in WhatsApp groups and the like on the one
hand, but top-down leaders and parties also have the possibility to push down
messages into these groups, targeting them and tailoring their messages. Apart
from this direct influence, agenda setting has also been reshaped, with digital
media being used to circumvent the role of traditional media and also shaping
the content of traditional media directly. In India, a country in which different
media – print, television and the internet – all continue to grow, more
empirical research is needed to understand how elections are influenced by
different media uses and how the reach of all these media – together – is
affecting election campaigns on the ground.
Finally, in answer to the question we pose in the title: all that can be said
at this stage, in view of the complex workings of media that have just been
described, is to give a complex but also clear answer: that digital media,
translated into visibility in traditional media, plus as a tool for on-the-
ground mobilization both among active supporters and in terms of getting
out the vote, were certainly necessary conditions for Modi’s overwhelming
electoral success (see also Neyazi, 2018; Schroeder, 2018a, 2018b). In other
words, his populist message via Twitter had served him well as a challenger
in 2014, but in 2019, this message also needed to resonate among and reach
a mass voting public, and this happened via translation into various chan­
nels including traditional media plus on the ground mobilization, and thus
propelled him to victory. Media therefore had both an (indirect) top-down
and a bottom-up effect. But since the second main precondition for keeping
him in power has been a longer-term groundswell of support for his popu­
list agenda it remains to be seen whether either or both of these forces will
maintain his dominance in Indian politics.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Ralph Schroeder http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4229-1585

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