InstaModi! India’s tech-savvy prime minister debuts on Instagram, gets 91,690 followers instantly

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the first Indian head of state to wake up to the possibilities of social media in politics, made his Instagram debut yesterday. He posted a photograph of the ASEAN Summit venue in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, and in less than 24 hours found 94,621 (and counting) followers.

Currently, Modi is India’s most-followed politician on Twitter with 7.82 million followers. It’s hard to believe that in January 2009 when he entered Twitter, it had gone almost unnoticed. Lok Sabha member of parliament Shashi Tharoor, who joined Twitter two months later in March 2009, was the first Indian politician to make waves on social media. A former UN under-secretary-general with a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Tharoor’s tongue-in-cheek tweets often got him into trouble with his ruling Congress party. He was the first Indian politician to reach 10,000, and then 100,000, followers on Twitter, and currently has 2.52 million followers.

Till 2013, Tharoor was India’s most-followed politician on Twitter. But the political currents had turned towards the BJP by then, and Modi leaped over Tharoor within months and today has more than three times as many followers. Modi’s Facebook page has 24,598,120 likes, and he has 250,384 followers on LinkedIn.

The BJP, and Modi in particular, used social media to good effect in this year’s election, taking a cue from Barack Obama’s election campaign in the US. The Congress, despite the presence of several western-educated leaders in its ranks, were Luddites in comparison.