New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party should be thankful to the critical YouTubers and bloggers and not the godi media after emerging as the largest party in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. If it weren’t for them, its performance would have been even worse – it may have been totally voted out of power as in 2004.
Unlike 20 years ago, this time it wasn’t just the BJP’s top leadership, but also its rank and file at the district and block levels that had an inkling at the very outset of the election campaign that the party may lose the electoral battle.
Though in 2004, like now, the mainstream television channels were singing paeans in praise of the government in power, but then there were no other means – barring intelligence inputs – for the ruling party machinery to become alert.
But in 2024, social media, especially independent YouTubers who took up cudgels on behalf of the opposition INDIA alliance, highlighted the real mood of the common masses and in the process made even the lowest-level BJP functionaries aware of the prevailing anger of the average voters.
While the top brass in the government, as always, got the latest inputs from the Intelligence Bureau, those at the local level got feedback from these objective sources and not the friendly media, which kept everyone in the dark.
It was at the bottom level that the party’s workers realised that it was time to rise to the occasion and not just expect that the Narendra Modi wave would lead them to victory.
Change in strategy
The BJP bigwigs, on their part, changed their poll rhetoric after the announcement of election dates on March 16. And when, after the first phase of polls on April 19 they observed that things were not going their way, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 21 delivered his famous ‘mangalsutras’ and ‘infiltrators’ speech in Banswara in Rajasthan.
A few weeks earlier, the BJP abandoned the idea of going to polls in alliance with the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha after Modi shared the dais with chief minister Naveen Patnaik on March 5 and showered praise on him. This decision to part ways yielded results.
Strangely, he took this decision when in January and February, the BJP took back into its fold the Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, respectively.
Also read: Why Godi Media May Be Hurting Modi
Thus, it can be said that more than the pro-government electronic media to whom Modi gave dozens of interviews, it was those opposing him, in a way, that helped him re-draw the BJPs’ poll strategy. As this was the longest election, it provided Modi and his team enough time to recover lost ground.
Sensing that they may really lose the election, the party’s grassroots level workers closed their ranks and buried their differences to fight unitedly. They may have serious reservations over the speeches made by Modi, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and Union home minister Amit Shah during the campaign; yet they tacitly approved them, as they knew that nothing could bail them out anymore.
Element of surprise
In contrast, in 2004, the duo of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his deputy Lal Krishna Advani went into the electoral battle without having any idea of losing it. They were so overconfident that ‘India Shining’ and ‘good governance’ would yield results that they never changed their strategy in the middle of the election. They did not trust the inputs from the ground.
The overall atmosphere was so goody-goody that even RSS surveys and the Intelligence Bureau could not come to the right conclusion. If they did indeed warn the BJP then, its leadership totally ignored them.
Advani went on to launch his 33-day-long Bharat Uday Yatra on March 10, 2004. In hindsight, it can be said that this 8,000+ kilometre yatra from Kanyakumari to Puri failed to bring positive results.
The NDA, especially the BJP, could not measure the changing mood of the common masses as the television channels and even the print media did not alert them then.
So, when the result came on May 13, 2004, the BJP was completely taken by surprise.
This correspondent still remembers a private discussion he had with the editor-in-chief of a reputed national television channel on March 11, 2004. He said, “Vajpayee is returning to power as Sonia Gandhi is nowhere in the race.” The irony is that this gentleman was not considered pro-government and this was his honest opinion.
Exactly two months later, the result was completely different.
In contrast, on March 11 this year, many ardent supporters of Modi in television channels were privately conceding that the situation was not as rosy as they were projecting it to be. Things started changing a few weeks after the January 22 consecration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. But they were compelled not to highlight the real, ground reality.
Independent YouTubers and bloggers warned the saffron party at the right time.
In that short period of a few weeks, there was no other formula for the BJP bigwigs to reverse the trend, so they resorted to the old and tested tactics of Muslim-bashing to seek votes. The results suggest that they have partially succeeded where the Vajpayee-Advani duo failed.
The time has come for the BJP to understand the importance of critical media.
Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist.
