In the last one month, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s YouTube channel has posted six videos, including a 12-minute grim video capturing his two-day visit to strife-ridden Manipur in July. Two of these videos have crossed three millions views. Mr. Gandhi, who has often called out the mainstream news channels biased, has been relying more on social media for a direct connect with people.
Mr. Gandhi joined YouTube on August 10, 2017, and eight days later came the first video of his interaction with Doon School students. The six-minute video gathered only 24,000 views. The channel has had modest viewership recording negligible growth for the first five years till September 2022 when Mr. Gandhi led the party’s 4,000-km march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir branded as Bharat Jodo Yatra.
As per an internal assessment, the subscriber base of his channel has grown five times from January 2022 (0.5 million) to 2.6 million in August 2023. The spurt that came during the yatra from September 2022-February 2023 has only been growing. The internal assessment points out that from September 2022-January 2023, the channel gained 8.2 lakh subscribers and from February-June 2023 another 10 lakh more subscribers have been added.
The former Congress president has often called out the mainstream news channels, accusing them of blocking out his party and distorting his image. During the five-month Bharat Jodo Yatra, he did not give interviews to any mainstream news channel, instead relied on YouTubers who have a significant subscriber base.
“When most mainstream communication mediums are controlled by the BJP, there was no other option but for us to get our message to people through alternative platforms like YouTube. We realise these platforms cannot be a perfect substitute for mainstream mediums but this was the only alternative,” Praveen Chakravarty, who heads Congress’ Data Analytics Department.
There is still a long way for Mr. Gandhi to outstrip Prime Minister Narendra Modi who globally has one of the largest social media presence (his YouTube channel has over 16 million subscribers), the Congress claims that Mr. Gandhi lately has better statistics in terms of audience engagement.
As per the Congress’s internal assessment, Mr. Gandhi’s videos on an average get 3,43,000 views, while the average views on Mr. Modi’s channel is 56,000. Mr. Gandhi’s videos get on average 1,700 comments and Mr. Modi’s videos get 137 comments.
Mr. Gandhi’s social media team is headed by Srivatsa YB and works independent of Congress’s social media team. “It is not about ball by ball countering the BJP. It is more about reaching people in their own spaces. We have found that women especially feel at ease and articulate their problems better when they are in their own spaces. Social media can not precede political impact. Our strategy is simple, capture the reality and put it out for the people to see. Politics creates content. The content doesn’t drive the politics,” one of Mr. Gandhi’s close associates said.
Quoting an example he said, the 8 minute 19 second video “Horn, OK, Please” posted on May 29, which captures his Delhi to Chandigarh journey in a truck was a six-hour all night drive. “There was a freewheeling and extensive interaction. What you see is only a small glimpse of it,” he added.
