Indian Election - the Digital battle

India is going into its Parliamentary Election process early 2014. This time, the two major national parties - Congress and BJP are putting their best foot forward in terms of Digital and Social presence. It is being told that this is going to be an epic battle on Social & Digital media with well known Consultants behind both of these two parties. While BJP has declared Narendra Modi as its Prime Ministerial candidate already, and going ahead with an aggressive Social & Digital strategy, Rahul Gandhi - the Congress face is yet to get into that offensive. However we have started monitoring them already, and will keep an eye on how the trend is moving.

Narendra Modi is so far ahead of Rahul Gandhi, by miles, in terms of Social media activities, Digital presence, Search etc. However recently Rahul Gandhi came out of his slumber and made a populist press conference where he slammed an Ordinance put forward by the Parliament (interestingly Rahul himself is a VP of the party which is the majority partner). After that outburst, it seems Rahul is inching far closer to Modi in terms of people's interest in digital forum.

The below chart is from Google Trends, where it is showing the search trend of Rahul Gandhi & Narendra Modi over September and October (till 3rd Oct). The steep spike on Narendra Modi's curve on 29th Sept was possibly due to the much hyped Delhi meeting on 30th Sept. That shows how Narendra Modi could generate so much of noise for a national rally. Rahul got the spike on 2nd Oct, after he slammed the Ordinance on 1st Oct. After 2nd Oct, there is not much activity happening on both the fronts, but the rate of decline for Narendra Modi is higher than that of Rahul, which must be worrying the Modi Digital Media consultants.

Rahul's digital campaign has been a non-starter so far. However with election nearing, we hope to see more activity from him in the coming days. Only once in last 6 months has Rahul been able to topple Modi in Google search volume, and that was on April 4th, when he made a speech at CII. 4th April to 2nd Oct is quite a long time. If Rahul wants to stand any chance to generate noise in the Digital & Social front, he needs to relook at his Social strategy fast.

One month is a short window to predict the future, but for those who love numbers, get glued to this space. We will keep looking at the Indian General Election through data science in days to come.


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