Haughty Hunters Turn Hunted In Viral War
BY R.K.MISRA
Political fortunes wax and wane like
the moon. The heady hunter of 2012 and 2014 is the hamstrung hunted of 2017 . How times change.
Time was when chief minister Narendra
Modi had the nation in thrall as he used social media to build public opinion
and deliver a devastating blow to his political opponents in the run-up to the
2012 Gujarat Vidhan Sabha elections and the 2014 general elections in the
country. He swept both.
Switch to 2017.Five years later. Again,
the run-up to the Gujarat Vidhan Sabha elections of 2017. The BJP is at the
receiving end of a devastating social media campaign that has the rulers of
Gujarat and India fumbling for an answer. The way the campaign has gone viral indicates
that it was born out of the harassed commoners travails and is a reaction to
the glib talking of the party and governments in power in Gujarat and the
Centre.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s man
Friday , BJP president, Amit Shah seemed nervy when in Ahmedabad on September 10 he told youth not to fall prey to the anti-BJP
propaganda being ‘mounted’ by the Congress on social media.
What a change in just one Vidhan Sabha
term. BJP which pioneered the social media as an electoral weapon of opponent
annihilation is warning people to beware of it’ s use by the principal
opposition ! The grand goliath of
Gujarat in thrall of decimal david which it had days ago decapacitated of seven
legislators and threatened to dismember it further?
This is the first indication of unease
in the ruling camp in Gujarat. The fact is that ‘vikas’ jokes have gone viral
on the social media amongst gujarati s the world over.’ Sab ka sath,sab ka
vikas’(everyone together, everyone developed) has been the domineering punch line
of the ruling BJP pre-2012 which was adopted for the nationals in 2014 by it’ s
prime mover , then BJPs prime ministerial candidate. Narendra Modi and his
party. This was taken up to counter the Congress campaign of “disha
badlein,dasha badlein’(change direction, change position).
It was in addition to an ‘injustice to
Gujarat’ campaign by the ruling set-up in
the state pointing fingers at the UPA ruled centre. The advertisement on
TV,radio and the social media reverberated with the sound of a stunning slap
and proved very effective. The poll onslaught was further bolstered by the use
of hi-tech, multi-centre, audio-visual techniques to address many public
meetings in different places simultaneously. In the 2007 Vidhan Sabha elections
in Gujarat, it was Modi masks which were the rage.
This time, however, as the gap widens between the real position on the ground and the poll
propaganda created haze, the ruling
party is becoming the butt of ridicule on the social media. And
‘vikas’(development),the swan song of the BJP has been brought to ‘life’ as a living
being.
It all began with a simple innocent
joke that for all the years BJP has been in power in Gujarat, Vikas should now
be of marriageable age. As the party in power hyped it’s poll related campaign the contrast, akin
to ‘India shining’ campaign at the Atal Bihari Vajpayee ruled centre in
2004,became more glaring. The state is
yet to emerge fully from the recent flood havoc and the statewide Narmada rath
yatra now followed by the ‘sankalp yatra’ and a rash of prime ministerial
inaugurations or foundation stone laying ceremonies have set in. On the other hand , public
meetings of the chief minister are choc-a-bloc on the social media with
graphics of row on row of empty chairs and people urging the Narmada yatra not
to stop at their village.
Then came the social media catchline ,Vikas
gando thayo chhe’(Vikas has gone mad). After the torrential rains in Ahmedabad
recently ,newspapers and television
channels had been full of reports of cratered roads and people landing in
hospital with multiple fractures. Every public grievance got hitched to this
tagline which went viral. However, instead of attending to this problem on a
war footing, the government seemed more bothered about prime minister Narendra
Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe’s two-day visit to Ahmedabad on
Setember 13-14.The government pulled out all the stops in decking the city
for their visit even repairing the roads
overnight on the route they were taking. ’We pay the taxes ,not the
Japanese”,said a post and myriads of other variations came up. The irony was
not lost on the people and found resonance in a rain of ‘Vikas’ jokes going
viral on the social media. Chief minister Modi won three elections shoring up
the Ahmedabad ‘metro’ as one of his poll planks. The metro is yet to start and
the bullet train is now a poll plank. Again the irony! And vikas steps in.
Off course, Vikas has now been replaced
by another campaign which goes against the ruling BJP and has also gone viral. The
tagline in gujarati goes “mara hara chetri gaya”..Translated in colloquial
hindi it would mean ,”Sasura ullu bana gaye” and the It’s rough equivalent in
english would be “bloody well, cheated us”. All the lofty poll promises,
campaign claims-past, present and future- as well as steps like demonetisation,
or surgical strikes, GST or petrol prices all have become subjects of
devastating black humour, pummeling the government. There were even navratri
garbas on it. More importantly, prime minister Modi has not been spared either.After
prime minister Modi’s latest visit came another tagline’phari chetri gayo(again
cheated us).
The fact is that the vikas’ jokes and the ‘cheat’ humour on social media went
viral as a people’s campaign, the congress has only now begun to see it as an
instrument that it can put to use. Again while the BJP has been the first user of technology and social media
as a poll campaign instrument to build public opinion, it’s rivals including
the Congress, Aam Admi Party(AAP) and numerous other social and political
groups are now excelling in it and capitalizing on the incipient
anger-anti-incumbancy- against the ruling establishment in Gujarat.
That the social media campaign going
against the ruling party in the state has serious implications is evident from
two visits of union finance minister Arun Jaitley within a fortnight to just
this end. In his second meeting is reported to have taken both the chief
minister, deputy chief minister and the state media cell to task.
Interestingly, in a state racked by
ethnic conflict, all those leading caste groups which are at loggerheads with
the government, are putting social media to effective using. This is true
of Hardik Patel who has been leading the
patidar community stir for reservation
in jobs and educational institutions under the OBC or Jignesh Mevani who has
been heading the dalit stir or Alpesh Thakore crusading for the OBCs. As
governments are prone to do, everytime it hits a sandbank, the establishment
curbs the internet ,only causing further
financial losses in Modi’s ‘Digital India’ .
The outcome of the Gujarat poll war
may be two months away but the BJP social media fortress seems to be crumbling
at this moment.
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