Abstract
The Lok Sabha Elections 2019 in the world’s largest democracy, India, was the biggest electoral event on the planet. These elections are key in the selection of the Prime Minister, the highest authority in the cabinet. Keeping in pace with the global trend, the Indian elections saw a very prominent use of Online Social Media by political parties to create a major discourse around the event. We focus our study on Twitter, collecting over 45 Million tweets, tracking more than 3500 hashtags and over 2500 political handles while monitoring their network interactions. In this work, we have analysed tweets from all these political handles to see how narratives were shaped and altered over time. We study these narratives formed by the party already in power and how they were supported or challenged by other parties. Spanning over 5 months, January to May 2019, we analysed the monthly changes in the rhetoric created by the leading political parties and leaders. We then discern the impact of these changes on existing narratives during the campaigning and the elections.
Highlights
Indian Politics, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC) To understand the scenario of these elections in a better way, we can have a brief look at the political history of the nation
We extracted twitter handles of candidates contesting in the elections for the official website of the Election Commission of India (ECI) where all the candidates must mandatorily fill in their social media handles while filing their nomination
As a conclusion we can say that the discourses formed on Twitter by both the major political parties – Bhartiya Janata Party and Indian National Congress, we’re very divergent
Summary
The framework under which the politics operate consists of a central authority at the centre, and various state governments at its periphery. In this Bicameral legislative framework, there are two houses of the parliament, the Rajya Sabha which is the upper house of the parliament representing the state and the Lok Sabha which is the lower house of the parliament and represents the people of the country. The Indian National Congress (INC) was formed in 1885, when India was under the British rule. Ever since it was formed, its agenda remained independence of the country from the English. Even until 2014, there were small periods like 1977-1980, 1989-1991 and 1996-2004 when the party
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