New Delhi: Comedians, bhajan singers, food vloggers, dancers and influencers with sizeable online followings — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is looking to woo a panoply of popular figures to give it a boost in next year’s Lok Sabha election campaign, as well as upcoming assembly polls.
For this, the party is looking beyond existing ideological sympathisers, to court social media icons with public reach who may be neutral to the party’s politics, but who the BJP hopes eventually to include in its digital army in order to promote work done by the Narendra Modi-led government.
BJP workers from across the country have been told to identify local social media stars, who members of the party’s central leadership will meet personally during visits to districts to win them over.
Every district unit has been instructed to identify 100 such influencers, party sources said, adding that leaders have also been told to listen more than speak during their interactions with the influencers, to connect better, and to get a sense of sentiments on the ground.
BJP national president J.P. Nadda emphasised these points in an interaction with senior party leaders last week, telling them to ensure that the meetings are interactive and don’t turn into one-way public speeches, the sources added.
Discussing the initiative, party spokesperson R.P. Singh said, “The BJP is reaching out to every section of society to make them aware of work done by the Modi government. The Maha Sampark Abhiyan (connection-building campaign) is placing special focus on meeting and connecting with social media influencers from across country, as we believe in sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka prayas.”
They’ve already made a start: Union ministers S. Jaishankar and Piyush Goyal, and party MPs Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore and Poonam Mahajan, met and interacted with social media influencers and stars in Delhi and Rajasthan last week.
“There are two social media models for campaigning and outreach. One is recruiting our own digital warriors and engaging sympathiser-influencers who want to associate with our ideology and our work,” said a senior BJP leader who is supervising the exercise of identifying social media influencers from across the country.
And the second? “There are hundreds of desi talents, singers, comedians, food vloggers and dancers who’ve become celebrities in recent years in their districts owing to their huge social media subscriber and fan bases. These people are professionals and neutral to party ideology. We have to sensitise them and bond with them. Initially, they may not spread our ideology, but constant meetings and good gestures can turn them sympathetic to our good work.”
The leader added that “since these desi influencers have a huge impact on people, we are identifying such influencers in every district and senior members of the party’s central leadership are meeting them personally to bond with them. Sometimes, neutral people [among the voters] aren’t influenced by sympathiser-influencers, so we need influencers who have social connect.”
According to BJP sources, the party’s defeat in last month’s Karnataka assembly elections, which the Congress won with a thumping majority, triggered the push towards reaching out to social media influencers in some measure.
“The Lok Sabha elections are approaching and the party [BJP] knows that the Congress has used social media influencers in a big way in Karnataka. They are not lagging behind in using influencers and social media warriors. Traditional media has its own limitations, so the entire campaign infrastructure has to be strengthened for clear-cut, result-oriented messaging and outcomes,” said a BJP national general secretary.
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Identifying and bonding with social media influencers
As part of the initiative, Jaishankar met more than 50 YouTube and Instagram influencers — each with between 10 and 50 lakh followers — in Delhi last Friday, and spoke about the government’s work over the past nine years.
Also last week, sources said, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s son Pankaj Singh — a vice president of the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh unit — met YouTuber Amit Bhadana as part of an outreach programme, ‘Sampark Se Samarthan Abhiyan’.
Bhadana, one of India’s top-ranking humour content creators, has more than 2.4 crore subscribers on YouTube, with many of his videos being viewed more than 20 million times.
The push to identify and bond with social media influencers has also picked up pace in states that are facing elections later this year. Visiting senior leaders have been asked to meet such figures.
For instance, in Rajasthan last week, Goyal, Rathore and Mahajan met bhajan singer Anil Nagori, Marwari dancer Shanti Choudhary and comic artiste Gautam Pareek — all of whom enjoy huge social media followings.
Jogendra Taj Purohit, the BJP’s social media convener for Rajasthan, said, “We are selecting and identifying local influencers in every district to sensitise them about the good work done by the Modi government in the past nine years. In every district, our aim is to identify at least 100 influencers and meet them personally to bond with them. Most of them are neutral influencers [those not influenced by the party] — singers, comedians, those with a huge impact on the masses. People listen to their bhajans and songs, watch their comedy. This way, we can tap 3,000 social media influencers in the state.”
Abhishek Sharma, the BJP’s social media convener for Madhya Pradesh, said. “Our focus is to identify influencers in every district and senior leaders have been assigned to meet these local influencers in their districts till [next year’s] Lok Sabha election. We will identify thousands of social media stars in [every] state.”
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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