For over a decade the ruling BJP has been a dominant force on social media—primarily on X and Facebook. A highly organised social media outreach, thousands of handles, among them many ‘bots’, all with a quicksilver ability to generate trends, memes, viral videos, mass retweets and buzzy hashtags. This social media mobilisation—as well-organised as the BJP’s formidable on ground cadres—contributed crucially to the Hindu Right wing’s power to influence national chatter and determine media priorities.
Currently, Modi has over 101 million followers on X and the BJP official handle has 22.2 million followers.
But today, the same social media is a shrieky millstone around the government’s neck, pushing the Modi government into a meekly defensive corner. Top government functionaries are suffering from X obsession, complicit and deeply influenced by “nationalist” X handles.
Constitutional principles are being sacrificed at the altar of social media outrage. Modi’s vaunted social media warriors—the BJP’s well-known IT Cell—who once zealously propagated the Modi juggernaut online, have turned into an untamable, outrage-a-minute chaotic lobby, wreaking havoc on deliberative governance. What was once an asset is now rapidly becoming a liability.
Let’s take the latest example of X intervention in the behaviour of the government. On 6 October, in an utterly deplorable act, a 71-year-old advocate Rakesh Kishore threw a shoe at the Chief Justice of India BR Gavai. Apparently, Kishore objected to certain remarks by the CJI and saw them as an insult to “sanatan dharma”.
To throw a shoe at the country’s top jurist in open court in the country’s highest constitutional court should have attracted immediate condemnation from the government. Instead, most of the government and top ministers kept silent, while the Right-wing X army kept up a frenzied anti-Gawai campaign, circulating highly objectionable and unconstitutional casteist messaging about Gavai’s background. In fact, the campaign against the CJI had been triggered by Right-wing handles weeks prior. The online agitation finally led to the shoe-throwing.
BJP-allied handles kept up a cacophony against Gavai even after the incident, while the BJP government seemed subdued, as if petrified into silence by the X storm unleashed by its own ‘loyal’ IT soldiers.
It took eight hours for Prime Minister Modi to finally tweet in support of the Chief Justice and condemn the shoe throwing, but by then it was too late. Internet warriors had already set the narrative that the Chief Justice had somehow got his just desserts.
Now, even BJP allies like Ramdas Athawale are calling for stricter action against the shoe thrower but the government seems powerless to rein in the X handles keeping up diatribes against Gavai. We do not hear a single note of censure of these handles from the Law Minister. The online foot soldiers, not the government, seem to have set the agenda. X handles who don’t care for constitutional principles have pushed the government into a situation of submissive weakness. The same BJP ministers—who are so quick to go on social media to urge people to join a private ‘swadeshi’ WhatsApp app—mostly stay quiet when a shoe is thrown at the Chief Justice of India.
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Embarrassment, not asset
This is by no means an isolated case. Over the last decade there have been several cases where the Right-wing internet lobby has embarrassed the government and even forced its hand.
After the Pahalgam terrorist attack earlier this year, Right-wing handles launched a hate campaign against the widow of a naval officer killed in Pahalgam—Himanshi Narwal—simply because she courageously spoke of the need to maintain religious unity. The National Commission of Women did come out in support of Himanshi, but top functionaries of the Modi government stayed away from supporting Himanshi and her call for religious harmony.
Even India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri has not been spared by Right-wing “nationalist” handles. After Misri announced the cessation of military hostilities between India and Pakistan in May, Misri’s daughter was abused as “traitor”. The point here is not just the behaviour of X accounts but the near-total silence of the BJP government on attacks on its own top diplomat.
It’s as if the BJP does not dare to oppose these internet ‘militants’ who do not play by any rules of defamation or right to privacy or any limits on violent language.
More embarrassment was caused to the Modi government by Right-wing handles when actor Deepika Padukone was attacked online for wearing a headscarf in an advertisement promoting Abu Dhabi tourism. The Modi government is a staunch ally of the UAE, Modi has thrown his weight behind regular high-level dialogues with the UAE. Yet, once again, the mainstream BJP government fell silent when Padukone was attacked for promoting tourism for its alliance partner country. We did not hear any reprimand or criticism from the government against these X handles.
In the recent Asia Cup cricket tournament between India and Pakistan, the Right-wing X army created a highly unfortunate and needless controversy. Shrill internet campaigns of ‘Boycott Pakistan’ reached such a crescendo, that the two countries’ teams did not shake hands after the match. But prior to the tournament, at a press meet, and referees’ meet, India cricket captain Suryakumar Yadav had allegedly shaken hands with the Pakistan captain Salman Agha.
Sane rational governance requires taking a considered decision on whether to play Pakistan in a cricket tournament or not. If public opinion was seen as such a spoiler, why did the cricket establishment allow India to play Pakistan in the first place? In fact, I had argued in Parliament that the government’s decision to green light India-Pakistan cricket this year was misguided, given the circumstances after the Pahalgam attack.
However, once the decision had been taken to play Pakistan, sober governance required that authorities in India made sure that the game was played according to the rules of global sportsmanship, and the standards of international cricket. The childish we-won’t-shake-your-hand standoff appeared to be a knee jerk reaction that had not been properly thought through and was entirely provoked by the high-pitched social media frenzy against Pakistan. This is hardly the way international sport is to be played and does little for India’s image as a leader in international cricket. Once again there was no admonishment for the uncontrolled venom poured from Right-wing handles, no top government or ruling party voice defended the decision to play cricket with Pakistan or sounded a firm note of disapproval at the hate-filled noise on X. The BJP government is not helpless. If it wanted it could sound strong warnings to these handles. But it’s almost as if the BJP-led regime allows its online army to create a hate-filled upsurge to maintain a level of social polarisation.
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Social media diplomacy
Social media seems to be leading the Modi government by the nose. In the aftermath of India-Pakistan hostilities due to Pahalgam, the Right-wing attacked Turkey and kept trending ‘Boycott Turkey’ because of Turkey’s support to Pakistan. This online campaign, a sort of social media-isation of diplomacy, created so much tension that it led to a rupture of relations between India and Turkey and a cancellation of an airport contract with a private Turkish company, Celebi.
The online communal pitch against Bangladesh—echoed by the legacy media—has also taken a toll on India-Bangladesh relations. The “infiltrators from Bangladesh” line is repeatedly echoed by top BJP leaders.
“Hindu nationalist’ handles once sang praises of Donald Trump, seeing him as someone at the forefront of an anti-Muslim campaign. The same handles now pour hate on the Trump regime, considerably narrowing the government’s scope for negotiation with the US except by stealth.
On the 2020 Sushant Singh Rajput death case, Right-wing social media handles managed to influence the criminal justice system to such an extent that a shocking miscarriage of justice almost took place. It played out during the 2020 Bihar Assembly polls, and no one in government dared to go against X handles propagating what has turned out to be an entirely one-sided storyline on Rajput’s tragic death.
It can even be argued that the constant online demonisation and name-calling of Kashmiris is preventing the Modi government from undertaking a genuine outreach to the Kashmiri people. It is being forgotten that Kashmir Valley residents took out a protest march against the Pahalgam terrorist killings. But imagine the online outrage today if the government officially stepped up people-to-people contacts with Kashmiris.
And every 2 October, on Gandhi Jayanti, the Right-wing trends the name of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse. Such pro-Godse online rallying by Sangh Parivar-allied names reduces the government’s own ceremonial homage to the Mahatma to mere empty ritual. Why is the Modi government powerless to stop online Godse support even as it makes a great show of its devotion to Gandhi?
After the 2017 murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh, social media handles describing themselves as ‘proud Hindus’ or ‘nationalists’, expressed open jubilation at Lankesh’s slaying. ‘A bitch died a dog’s death and now all the puppies are wailing in the same tune,’ posted Nikhil Dadhich, a Surat-based textile trader, on 5 September 2017 in Hindi. Another X user, Ashish Mishra, posted on the same day, ‘Jaisai Karni, Vaisai Bharni’ (as you sow so you shall reap). His bio declared: ‘I am Hindu and Team PM Modi.’ At the time both Dadhich and Mishra were followed by Narendra Modi on X. Neither was censured for their tweets by the BJP or by the prime minister.
Home Minister Amit Shah himself was recently forced to delete a tweet on population figures of Muslims in India. Shah was using a tweet on Muslim population figures to bolster polarising ‘Hindu Muslim’ rhetoric and prop up the “Bangladeshi- -Rohingya-infiltrator-ghuspethiye” narrative pushed by the BJP’s internet army.
But Shah was caught out: If infiltration has risen and boosted India’s Muslim population (and this itself is disputable), then surely Shah as Home Minister is the one expected to secure India’s borders. The ‘Bangladeshi-Rohingya-ghuspethiya-infiltrator’ line is another example of the BJP using social media as a weapon of mass disinformation. As it turned out Shah’s tweet backfired and was deleted.
The Modi-led BJP once expertly rode the social media tiger but today the ruling establishment can’t control it; the tiger is raging around in an overwhelming manner and dragging the party along.
Right-wing social media handles have become a law unto themselves. They freely use profanities and rumour-mongering. They don’t recognise legal or constitutional restraints, and seem to be able to bring the government to its knees with their ability to build a narrative, spread disinformation and misinformation, ferociously nail individuals to a wall and set the agenda for the mainstream media.
A level-headed government guided by the public interest should determinedly get on with the task of day-to-day governance and pursue well planned priorities by remaining impervious to X hysteria and shock-a-minute eyeball grabbing sound-and-fury “trends”.
But the Modi government appears unable to shake itself free of X. It is increasingly pandering to social media outrage, a silent enabler of the monster it has itself created.
Sagarika Ghose is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)