With the Lok Saba elections winding up, a tweet from BJP leader Narendra Modi has become the most RTd tweet from India ever - according to
Twitter India. At the time of writing, one hour after the tweet was posted, it had been retweeted 35,779 times, and favourited 21,414 times. Here is the tweet:
With the elections all but over and the BJP so far seeming to be in an overwhelming majority, it's safe to say that a lot of people in the country wanted to express their support for the party that they voted for.
The elections have been described as the first example of a social election, and according to a
post by Twitter India, more than 56 million election related tweets were posted from January 1 till May 12 when the polls ended.
The post has some other interesting data including a video that shows a time lapsed heat map of tweets. Modi's handle @NarendraModi reached 3.97 million followers, growing by 28 percent since January 1. The Aam Aadmi Party's Arvind Kejriwal's handle, @ArvindKejriwal reached 1.79 million people, growing by 79 percent from the start of the year.
In 2012, the US elections took place, and became the most tweeted about event in US political history. At that point, President
Barack Obama had tweeted, "Four more years", which crossed 300,000 retweets in less than 40 minutes, crossing half a million in five hours.
The overall record still sits with the
star studded selfie tweet at the Oscars, which had a million retweets by the end of an hour, which brought the term selfie to the mainstream.
What this tweet by Modi proves though, is that while celebrities trump politics internationally, the very opposite is true for India.