THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Climbing the ladder of mass popularity in the country’s last citadel of communist rule, Kerala, the BJP has achieved a milestone of a million followers on the social media platform Facebook. As BJP Keralam, the party’s official Facebook page, completed 10 lakh followers on Saturday, its closest rival CPM has only 7.72 lakh followers and the Congress just 3.52 lakh.
Considering the BJP growth story still has some way to go to catch up with the CPM and the Congress on the ground, the state leaders attribute the social media swell to the party’s successful Christian outreach programme and the ‘Modi magic’. The development comes amid BJP’s membership campaign.
This surge in numbers was set off just after the general elections where the BJP performed well, winning the Thrissur constituency and finishing first in several assembly constituencies. The two ministers from the state in the Narendra Modi government too boosted the party’s outreach to sections which were earlier unresponsive to the BJP.
BJP convenor-in-charge of social media S Jayasankar attributes these gains to Prime Minister Modi’s acceptance and popularity among a wider section of society.
“We have always been working on PM’s single agenda of development,” Jayasankar told TNIE.“We might have indulged in attacking the opposition parties and their leaders. However, we minimised it as the national leadership instructed us to use social media in creative ways. We had only seven lakh followers in the state before the parliamentary elections.”
According to the party leadership, the Modi factor played a major role in increasing the social media following, citing that Modi has an approval rating of 40-45% in any survey conducted at any time in Kerala.
For the first time, a large section of people from the Christian community, the second largest minority in the state, are responding positively and openly to BJP’s social media posts.
“People from the Christian community were out of the party’s reach thus far. Now, we are receiving positive responses. Earlier, they were in a defensive mode as many had the apprehension that if they came out openly in support of the BJP, they would be stigmatised as communalists and ‘krisanghi’ -- a word used by opponents for Christians inclined towards the RSS-BJP ideology. However, that changed completely when the party gave George Kurian a berth in the third Modi cabinet,” Jayasankar said.