The Anointed Son, The Hired Gun, and the Chai Wala: Enemies and Insults in Politicians’ Tweets in the Run-Up to the 2019 Indian General Elections

Abstract

This study seeks to assess the prevalence, style, and impact of antagonistic messaging on Twitter in the two years preceding the 2019 Indian General Elections. Focusing on the leadership of the two key parties – the ruling BJP, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah, and the opposition INC’s president Rahul Gandhi, we attempt to understand how the politicians sought to portray each other on Twitter, and how their followers reacted to these characterizations, through the lens of Murray Edelman’s work on the ‘Political Enemy’. By thematically coding tweets and quantitatively analyzing their retweets, we find that negative tweets by and large are significantly more popular for all three politicians, and that the opposition leader allocated a significantly larger proportion of his tweets to attacks. We conclude that while leaders in power and those in opposition may take different stances with messaging, Twitter as a social networking site can perpetuate the online reward for attacking behavior.