Academic Publication by Nishtha Jain, Preet Malviya, Purnima Singh and Sumitava Mukherjee
Due to the tremendous increase in internet accessibility, new media is growing as a major arena for political communication in the country. Political leaders have also seized this space for direct communication with their followers since it’s easy to use, wide-ranging, and creates a perception of being more accessible and authentic. In times of crisis, the need for such communication by the leaders is even more magnified. While Twitter has grown popular among political leaders as a means of computer-mediated mass media communication alternative, the COVID-19 pandemic required new strategies for socio-political communication to handle such a crisis. India was one of the worst-hit countries and is also the world’s largest democracy.
We analyzed the usage and content of communication on Twitter by some key national political leaders of India during the COVID-19 pandemic, which perhaps is the most astounding crisis to beset the world in the past decade.
Data consisted of tweets posted by 6 political leaders in India across the four lockdown periods, that is, from 25th March to 31st May 2020. The inclusion criteria for the political leaders were: popularity index on Twitter (number of followers > 1 million), activity on Twitter (number of posts > 100), verified personal account, and position of the leader in the country. The leaders were categorized in three groups: ruling party leaders, Shri Narendra Modi (Prime minister) and Shri Amit Shah (Home Minister); opposition party leaders, Shri Rahul Gandhi (key member of a prominent opposition party and member of the parliament) and Shri Arvind Kejriwal (president of a prominent opposition party and the chief minister at the capital of India, Delhi); and key-crisis-management leaders, Shri Harsh Vardhan (Health Minister) and Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman (Finance Minister). The tweets of the leaders were further divided in four periods in accordance with the lockdown phases in India: Lockdown 1.0: 25 Mar – 14 Apr 2020 (21 days); Lockdown 2.0: 15 Apr – 3 May 2020 (19 days); Lockdown 3.0: 4 May 2020 – 17 May 2020 (14 days); and Lockdown 4.0: 18 May 2020 – 31 May 2020 (14 days). Tweets (n = 4158) were composed predominantly in the English language (55.51%), followed by Hindi (44.27%), and other languages (0.19%; Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil).
In terms of number of followers, Narendra Modi (Prime Minister) ranked the highest (57.9 Million) whereas Harsh Vardhan (Health Minister) ranked the lowest (2.3 Million). Modi also had the highest number of retweets (56,42,983), that is, the number of times Modi’s tweets were retweeted by other users, while Arvind Kejriwal (Chief Minister of Delhi) had the lowest number of retweets (7,88,700).
Exploratory data analysis, sentiment analysis, and content analysis were conducted. It was found that the tweets had an overall positive sentiment, an important crisis management strategy. Four main themes emerged: crisis management information, strengthening followers’ resilience and trust, reputation management, and leaders’ proactiveness.
The leaders communicated about the precautions to be undertaken by the public, the executive orders issued, and the relief measures taken by the government, the need for volunteers and donations, public briefings, and related opinions or comments on the issues arising due to the pandemic. Of the total 2,809 tweets, crisis-management informational tweets formed the majority (30.9%), wherein Harsh Vardhan (Health Minister) was found to make most such tweets (36.8%), followed closely by Arvind Kejriwal (Chief Minister of Delhi; 33.5%) and Amit Shah (Home Minister; 31.8%). However, on a closer look, most tweets by Amit Shah were about resource provision. Modi (Prime Minister) tweeted the least number of informational messages overall but did communicate the most about precautionary measures.
By focusing on such discursive aspects of crisis management, the study comprehensively highlights how political interactions on twitter integrated with politics and governance to handle COVID-19 in India. The study has implications for the fields of digital media interaction, political communication, public relations, and crisis leadership.
Excerpts from the original paper published on Frontiers in Psychology authored by Nishtha Jain, Preet Malviya, Purnima Singh and Sumitava Mukherjee. Copyright © 2021 Jain, Malviya, Singh and Mukherjee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
