Politics goes Tiktok in new-age campaigning

NEW DELHI: A short-video app made for mobile phones, and launched in 2016, is providing some zing in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, widely hyped as India’s first social media election.

The app is Tiktok, and its virtually inexhaustible library of prompts, and easy editing tools, using which people can create their own short videos, has resulted in a veritable deluge of political memes or just political videos. People can lip-sync to some of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches, make a meme featuring Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s “Chowkidar Chor Hai” (the watchman is a thief) barb aimed at Modi, or just riff off Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s dismissive “Toh kar na” (then, why don’t you do it; a remark aimed at the Opposition in the Delhi assembly).

In January, there were 60 million active Indian users who together spent 12.8 billion minutes on it, as per data by Comscore, a mobile analytics firm. That’s almost 3.5 hours a month per user. With the average length of the most popular Tiktok videos being 15-20 seconds, that’s a lot of videos (630-840 actually).

As per Sensor Tower, another analytics firm, the app has been downloaded close to 260 million times in India.

Analysts aren’t sure that number will stay high, but based on these numbers, it’s safe to say that Tiktok is definitely the flavour of the season — and that fact isn’t lost on political parties, even if some of them aren’t fully convinced about it.

The Congress social media cell’s chief, Divya Spandana, says Tiktok is less political compared to other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, but adds that it is entertainment combined with shock value, making it an unusual platform for people who use Twitter and Facebook regularly.

“Tiktok has a lot of young users, including first-time voters who are the ones to be targeted. We do have a lot of our volunteers who use the app.

I have seen videos of some of Rahul Gandhi’s one-liners like ‘chowkidaar chor hai’ on Tiktok,” she said.

The Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) social media strategist, Ankit Lal, echoes Spandana and adds that Tiktok has brought humour and fun back on the Internet.

“While the party [AAP] does not have any organised presence on the platform, individual volunteers use the platform to share quirky messages regularly,” he said NEW DELHI: One of seven Indian engineers abducted by Taliban gunmen in Afghanistan’s Baghlan province in May last year returned safely to India on Monday, the external affairs ministry said. The Indians were travelling in a largely Taliban-controlled area when they were abducted from their vehicle last year. “We are grateful to the government of Afghanistan for their support in securing the release and repatriation of the Indian national. We continue to work closely with the government of Afghanistan for safe and early return of the remaining six Indian nationals,” the MEA said in a statement.

The Indian engineers of KEC International, an RPG group company, were working on a project for construction of a power sub-station in Afghanistan. Kidnapping of locals and foreigners is common in the country, where large parts are controlled by militants.

A government official with knowledge of the matter said in May last year that more than 1,700 Indian engineers and technical experts were working across Afghanistan on large infrastructure projects. India has been carrying reconstruction activities in the war-torn country.