Modi uses memes, music and selfies to woo India's young voters
With campaigns moving into high gear as the first stage of India’s weekslong election kicks off 19 April, political parties are targeting voters – especially a younger, tech-savvy generation – with emotive or often bitingly funny ads, memes, and music videos.
A visibly anxious couple await the arrival of their daughter outside an airport. After what appears to be an agonizing wait, the girl runs out of the airport to her parents and says, "Regardless of what the situation may be, I told you that Mr. Modi will bring us home."
It's a scene from a viral advertisement doing the rounds ahead of the elections. It highlights a popular belief in India – one pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party – that he briefly intervened in the early days of the Russian advance into Ukraine to help Indian students studying there escape.
At the end of the advertisement, a clip of Modi runs with him proclaiming, "My India, my family."
With campaigns moving into high gear as the first stage of India's weekslong election kicks off 19 April, political parties are targeting voters – especially a younger, tech-savvy generation – with emotive or often bitingly funny ads, memes, and music videos.
The numbers show how much of an advantage that strategy can potentially yield. There are some 18 million first-time voters and another 197 million Indians between the ages of 20 and 29. Hundreds of millions more are active consumers of social media, in a country with nearly 700 million smartphone users and some of the world's lowest data rates.
"The strategy is to influence the young voters and they are very flexible in terms of their ideological moorings," said Amit Dholakia, professor of political science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. "It is more in line with the presidential kind of campaign where the leader is highlighted and the use of social media is to highlight and glorify the leaders."
Dholakia said the "one-on-one interaction" allowed by social media means politicians directly reach voters without any "kind of an intermediary" — a tactic that's been used extremely successfully by other world leaders, including former US President Donald Trump, who is currently gunning for another shot at the presidency.
Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party maintains an advantage here over their rivals. The BJP began using social media in a "systematic and scientific way" back in 2014, when the hugely-popular Modi helped the BJP win the national vote, according to Dholakia.
The party has the deepest coffers, and by every estimate retains its advantage this election season as well. According to a recent analysis by Google Ads Transparency Center, the BJP has spent $434 million since the start of the year, an enormous jump compared to the $35.1 million spent on the platform during the same period in the 2019 election.
India's opposition is doing its best to keep up. The Indian National Congress has presented a series of short ads in which a farmer, a young engineer and a woman highlight the wage gap and widespread concerns over the lack of jobs and high inflation. They all go on to demand accountability from the government.
Another regional party posted a tongue-in-cheek meme on Modi for April Fools' Day. "3,598 days of fooling the nation," the meme reads with a line drawing of Modi pumping his fist in the air.
Last week, in another attempt at courting younger Indians, the 73-year-old "interacted" with some of the country's top online gamers and in the video Modi is even seen playing some of the games.
Rahul Gandhi, the face of the Congress party, has long-alleged that the country's opposition does not receive fair coverage from the country's media. He has tried to get around that by doing interviews with influencers and Gandhi's team has also produced YouTube videos, where he is seen cooking with another opposition leader, discussing unemployment with citizens while campaigning, and even gifting a puppy to his mother.
Dholakia points to this as social media's advantage: allowing politicians to reach voters with "less manpower" when earlier "political workers used to go door to door distributing pamphlets and talking to people," he said. "Now that has been rendered irrelevant."
Music and memes
One song highlights a key theme of Modi's campaign: he fulfills promises. It's dubbed, like the party's manifesto released Sunday, as Modi ki Guarantee, or Modi's Guarantee.
"In the past decade, our India has been going through a golden age," run the lyrics of another song, "the son of the soil Narendra Modi, does not turn away from his promises." It's performed by Kavi Singh, the creator of over a 100 such songs that are exclusively about the BJP, Modi or the Hindu religion. This one is titled: Fir Modi Ko Le Aao, or Bring Back Modi Again.
Such third party content creation allows the consumer to forget this is "inherently political" content, said Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars. "It sort of takes away that skepticism that is generally associated with political messaging."
Memes aren't far behind in their edginess.
A meme on X, posted by the official BJP account, depicts Modi as Arnold Schwarzenegger from The Terminator, with a version of the movie's catchphrase "2024! I'll be back!" The post got over a million views.
The opposition parties have fought back in the meme wars. One of them shows a BJP-run washing machine tackling a load of allegedly corrupt politicians. The Instagram ad tries to bring attention to the opposition's allegations that Modi's party is using federal investigative agencies to harass and pressure their leaders to defect to the BJP.