Title : 2019 Indian General Election: The social media strategies of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress.
Abstract
Since the 2014 General Election in India, social media has been used by political parties to directly engage with voters, promote their ideology, mobilise supporters, and counter opponents. This talk focusses on the social media strategies of the two largest and most powerful political parties of India, the centre-right Bharatiya Janata Party, which currently heads the coalition government of India, and the centre-left Indian National Congress, the major opposition party, in the run-up to the 2019 General Election. It analyses the shift in the content and tactics of their social media strategies since the 2014 election. Based on interviews of politicians, journalists, and political communications experts, as well as a four-month study of the social media communications of the two parties, this talk will focus on the evolving forms and trends of political communications on social media in India.
Details
Date: January 11, 2019 (Saturday)
Time: 2:00 P.M.
Venue: (S)5.01, Bush House (Strand Campus) Location
Audience: Anyone Interested (In case you are not from KCL, kindly contact us so that we can arrange your visiting card at the reception)
Author's Bio-note
Dr. Sangeeta Mahapatra is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Asian Studies, German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany. She has been a former Fulbright Research Fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University, U.S.A., and a Global South Network scholar at the Graduate institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and has specialised in security studies and identity politics. She’s the Executive Editor of the Indian business magazine, Business Economics. As a journalist and an academic, she has covered the elections in India for the past ten years, as well as undertaken field studies on human rights and Hindu-Muslim relations in West Bengal, India. She has taught Indian politics and the use of the New Media for political communications at the Department of Political Science, Presidency University, Kolkata, and the Department of Mass Communications, NSHM Knowledge Campus, Kolkata. Her publications include Terrorism and Counter-terrorism Strategies: A Comparative Study of India, Israel, and the United States of America (forthcoming), Energy Security and Sustainability: Challenges and Prospects (Avenel, 2017), The Rise of Red Terror: The Ethics and Effectiveness of Maoist Violence in India (MCISS, 2010), Economic Globalisation: Understanding the process beyond the polemics (Prentice Hall India, 2009), Human rights in Pakistan: A heuristic of hope and despair (Gyan Books, 2009), and Communalism and Politics: Hindu-Muslim Relations in Kolkata’s Interface Areas (SIRRS, Jadavpur University, 2007). She is currently working on a research project on online extremist speeches of political actors in India and their impact on ideological polarisation and offline violence.
You can find more about the author here.
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