Modi wins online readers poll for TIME magazine
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won the online readers’ poll for Time Person of the Year 2016, beating world leaders such as US president-elect Donald Trump, incumbent US leader Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Modi won with 18% of the vote when the poll closed on Sunday night, getting significantly more votes than his closest contenders, including Obama, Trump and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who all received 7% of the “yes” vote.
Modi was also placed far ahead of other prominent figures of this year, such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (2% ) and US Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (4%), Time said.
Time’s editors will decide the final Person of the Year later this week, but the online poll results provide a look at how the world sees these figures and Modi emerged as the most influential figure in 2016, according to the online poll.
Time said the reader poll is an “important window” into who they think most shaped 2016. It is for the second time that Modi has won the online readers’ poll for Time Person of the Year title, securing the honour in 2014, when he had got more than 16% of the almost five million votes cast. For the fourth year in a row, Modi is among the contenders for Time’s “Person of the Year” honour, which the US publication bestows every year to the one “who has most influenced the news and our world in the past year, for good or ill”.
Last year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was Time’s “Person of the Year”.
Time said that in recent months, Modi saw high approval ratings from Indians, according to a September Pew poll.
It added that Modi has come under scrutiny recently for getting rid of ~500and ~1,000 notes, impacting cash-based businesses and threatening India’s economy.
Current poll results, analysed by poll host Apester, found that preferences differed across the world and the United States.
Modi performed particularly well among Indian voters as well as those in California and New Jersey.