BJP well ahead of congress in cyberspace
By Saheer Karimbayil   |   Monday, 06 April 2009, 19:42 IST
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Bangalore: As Lok Sabha elections are round the corner, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and opposition leader LK Advani have a clear lead in cyber world, compared to their opponent Indian National Congress led by Sonia Gandhi. According to the data available with the web information company Alexa, Advani's website www.lkadvani.in has a traffic rank of 4660, while his political rival and Congress leader Sonia Gandhi's website - www.soniagandhi.org - is ranked pathetically below at 608,233rd position. In India, the BJP leader's site is ranked at 334, while Sonia's website is ranked 32,763. On Advani's site, the number of pages viewed by a user per day on an average is 2.56. It is only 1.7 on Sonia's site. Net users have shown a clear sign of support to BJP as they preferred to visit the website of the saffron party over that of Congress. Globally, BJP's official website www.bjp.org is ranked at 18,920 th place based on the traffic, while Congress website www.aicc.org.in is at 23,699 th position. Indian ranking of the BJP website is 1,673 while that of Congress is 1,586. This data is relevant in the current context as many political parties in the country are taking to the cyber streets to do election campaigning and get desk ridden youth out to cast their votes. With nearly 50 percent of voters in the age group of 18-35 years, political parties are eying youth as a big vote bank. Another step most of the political parties have taken to attract youth is to promise substantial number of tickets to youngsters in the coming elections. On launching his website, LK Advani had said, "The Internet has many attractive attributes, but the best perhaps is that it is owned neither by the government nor by any private media groups. It is open to all and in this sense it is the most democratic of all the communication platforms invented by mankind so far." "In all modesty, we can claim that Advani's website is superior to any political website in India in terms of comprehensiveness of content, creativity of look, and interactivity with visitors. However, the website is only a tool. It is the message that makes the difference. BJP is conveying a message of hope, which is rooted in its promise of good governance, development and security. The main goal of this website is to get the youth out to cast their vote. And after all, though the Internet penetration in India is still small compared to our population, the number of mobile and internet users in our country is not insignificant at all", said Sudheendra Kulkarni, Communication Head at the office of LK Advani. A mail sent to the office of the Congress leader and India's Defence Minister AK Antony, seeking his comment on the data, remained unanswered. Online election campaigns by political parties have already become a cash cow for IT firms. Read about that here: https://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Online_election_campaigns_A_cashcow_for_IT_firms-nid-54865.html
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