Despite the heightened anxieties over the conduct of a free and fair election, India’s democracy rallied in the 2024 election, with voters denying Prime Minister Narendra Modi a landslide win. Much of the fight occurred online as independent journalists and influencers challenged the government narrative echoed on mainstream media.
The night before the 2024 Indian election results were to be announced, Dhruv Rathee released a “final message” YouTube video that was a cry from the heart.
The 29-year-old vlogger and social media activist is a cyber sensation in India, adored by his fans, reviled by his detractors, and acknowledged as one of Time magazine’s 2023 Next Generation Leaders. During the mammoth, six-week election this year, Rathee emerged as a powerful voice of dissent against Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies and the democratic backsliding the prime minister spearheaded for a decade.
As India awaited the Modi “landslide” victory – as the mainstream media exit polls had forecast – Rathee’s 25-minute video, released late Monday, sounded like the last words of a man facing the gallows. The condemned party in this case appeared to be democracy, with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) expected to win a “supermajority” of 400 seats in the 543-seat lower, triggering fears that the Hindu nationalist strongman would change the constitution.
But on that tense, expectant night, Rathee was not letting democracy die without a fight. And he was rallying his 55 million-odd unique YouTube users to do likewise.
“Hello friends,” Rathee began in Hindi with his hands folded in a traditional namaste. “Elections are now over. Tomorrow the election results will be announced. No one knows who will win how many seats,” said the movie-star-handsome young man, looking directly at the camera. “Our beloved country, the world’s largest democracy, should not turn into a dictatorship.”
'The audacity of hope' vote
Rathee need not have feared. The next day saw a triumph of Indian democracy, with a bruised and battered opposition, once dismissed as too weak to take on the populist Modi juggernaut, staging a stunning comeback.
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The BJP won 240 seats in the latest vote – below its 282 seats in the 2014 vote and well below its 303-seat sweep in the last general elections in 2019.
After a decade of opposition crackdowns, press clampdowns and a Modi personality cult that saw the prime minister’s bearded visage on everything from Covid vaccines to bags of grain, the ruling party did not make it to the 272 seats needed to form a majority. Modi’s third consecutive mandate was scraped through only with the help of two regional parties in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
“The BJP was aiming for a much larger mandate. They certainly expected to get a majority on their own as a party. They have lost that,” said Radha Kumar, a seasoned political analyst and author of “The Republic Relearnt: Renewing Indian Democracy”, on FRANCE 24’s The Debate show as the final results were coming in on Tuesday.
Modi appeared to have won a rare third consecutive term, but for the opposition and its supporters, the 2024 election results smelt like victory.
While the NDA won 293 seats, the opposition INDIA alliance led by Rahul Gandhi's centrist Congress party won over 230 seats, ensuring a stronger opposition in parliament for the next five years.
In a morning-after editorial, “The audacity of hope”, the independent Indian news site Scroll noted the dichotomy. “Seldom has there been so much joy in the shadow of defeat,” said the editor’s note. “In its enfeebled state, propped up by allies who know the precise cost of their support, the new BJP administration will be forced to temper its bluster and contain its malevolence against those it considers its enemies. Among those the BJP has considered its adversaries are independent journalists, several of whom have been jailed and prosecuted simply for doing their jobs.”
Taking on the ‘godi media’
The Modi administration’s media crackdown over a decade has seen India plummeting on press freedom indexes with “violence against journalists, highly concentrated media ownership, and political alignment” putting the fourth estate in “crisis”, according to Reporters Without Borders.
With the space for independent journalism shrinking, some of India’s most seasoned journalists migrated to YouTube.
Following the hostile takeover of NDTV by Gautam Adani, a billionaire businessman considered close to Modi, primetime anchor Ravish Kumar quit the TV station to launch his own YouTube channel. Kumar was the subject of the award-winning documentary, “While We Watched”, which recorded the strangulation of a once vibrant news organisation before it was finally taken over by Adani.
Read moreIndia’s top independent TV anchor battles on – but for how long?
An outspoken Modi critic, Kumar coined the term “godi media” (“godi” means "lap" in Hindi) and the term is now short for “lapdog media” – a grouping that includes most mainstream Indian TV stations.
In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, journalists and influencers on YouTube took on the godi media’s unquestioned relaying of the government narrative, holding truth to power. The coverage included serious reporting on spiraling unemployment and income inequalities under “Modinomics”, the prime minister’s brand of big business-driven market economics. Light coverage included savage takedowns of some of the government’s more grandiloquent claims, such as Modi “stopped” the war in Ukraine to rescue Indian students trapped in Kharkiv in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.
“YouTubers played a pretty important role, though of course one can't attribute exact effects. But the truth is that in a world in which mainstream media, in particular television, was really heavily compromised by the government crackdown and intimidation, internet spaces like social media and YouTube were the one place where independent journalists could get their word out,” said Irfan Nooruddin, a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. “The puncturing of some of the public relations narratives put forth by the government and transmitted by mainstream media occurred through YouTube influencers and YouTube media channels.”
Enormous reach, tremendous pressures
In his YouTube clips, Rathee, who lives in Germany, addresses his audiences in Hindi, the national language predominantly spoken in northern India, the populous “Hindi belt” region that is a BJP stronghold.
With more than 800 million internet users, including the world’s largest number of YouTube and Instagram account holders, India is a goldmine for digital content. After nearly eight years of producing political videos, Rathee’s reach is the stuff of influencer dreams.
“It’s quite a bit surprising, especially if you take into account that last month, my YouTube account reached 55 million unique YouTube users and on Instagram, the reach was over 44 million unique users. So, if you take it into account, it’s almost 100 million unique users that have been reached,” said Rathee in an interview with FRANCE 24 last month.
But with the reach comes pressures, primarily getting his facts right, said Rathee. “It’s extremely important. I not only have a big team of researchers, scriptwriters and fact-checkers, everything that I say in my videos, every argument, every fact, has been anaylysed again and again to check for its authenticity, how accurate it is. After my whole video is done, I even get it checked by a lawyer because you know the pressure is very high, I can’t afford to make a mistake,” Rathee told FRANCE 24.
When asked if the government had ever tried to silence or shut down his YouTube channel, Rathee replied, “Not yet, but there are trolls online trying to harass you and target you.”
An ‘inspiration’ for weakening democracies
The Modi administration, meanwhile, has tried pushing through a raft of measures to regulate the digital space. The government says the moves are necessary to tackle fake news. Critics however fear they are a means of tightening media laws.
Barely a month before the elections began, India’s Supreme Court put on hold an official initiative to identify fake news related to the government and state agencies.
The court’s ruling came a day after India’s ministry of electronics and information technology issued a notification establishing a Fact Check Unit (FCU) to flag false information related to the government and its agencies.
The case against the FCU was filed by a stand-up comedian and two journalist associations, who cited “unreasonable restrictions to freedom of speech and expression”.
India has led the world in internet shutdowns for six consecutive years, according to digital rights NGO, AccessNow. In its latest report, the NGO cited India, along with Russia, for the “passage of legislation” that are “making it easier for authorities to impose shutdowns”.
In the last year of Modi’s second term, the number of media platform bills on the legislative agenda has been impressive. These include the 2023 Telecommunications Bill, the draft Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill of 2023, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023.
Analysts say the outcome of the 2024 vote could slow the momentum of media curbs. Modi now enters a new era of coalition politics, unchartered territory for a politician known for his strongman style.
“I would imagine that in a coalition government, there should be slightly reduced pressure on the media from the BJP,” said Nooruddin, while noting that it would depend on how power is shared and who gets control of key positions such as the interior and information ministries. “But in a coalition government, the new coalition partners who are critical to the survival of the government will have a chance to try and get their people, or at least their preferred people, in power, and that could change the dynamics. So, all in all, I would expect that restriction on social media and on media more generally.”
For Rathee, though, the work of informing audiences will continue. “No matter what the outcome of the election tomorrow,” the YouTube activist told his followers on Monday night, the hard work of keeping democracy in shape would continue. His videos, for now, were a document “so that whenever democracy is weakening in any country in the world, and whenever people need courage, let our story be an inspiration for them”.
