Sonia Gandhi Joins Instagram as India’s Politicians Scramble to Decode the Platform

Sonia Gandhi has just joined Instagram, the latest in the line of political luminaries pivoting from text to the visual. Her first post is about a forthcoming memoir, and no doubt advisors have told her sales of books has a direct correlation with social media presence. India threw out TikTok, which makes Instagram and YouTube the default for short video clips, the most popular medium of online consumption whose reach has now steadily extended into politics.

The political establishment realised how decisively the social media landscape had changed in May when an unknown man called Abhijeet Dipke opened an Instagram account called Cockroach Janta Party and drew 20 million followers in a week. From there, it moved to the streets, got one minister to resign by July and is now part of the opposition that has come together in an agitation against the chief election commissioner. Politicians go to great lengths to be clued in to what keeps them in, or gets them to, power, but it is remarkable that they entirely missed Instagram as a disruptor of politics.

Urgent catch up has been underway since then. Every politician, from the prime minister downwards, is trying to negotiate the platform. They spent decades mastering Twitter, now X, but this is a different beast. X is words, jousting and back-and-forth. Video has no template. Young women wearing make-up, a man dressed as a gorilla and a party of cockroaches all become overnight celebrities. The only thing that connects them is age and instinctively knowing what the Facebook generation has to reason their way into--the visual impact. Most traditional politicians are from the Facebook generation.

Sonia Gandhi will get followers because she is who she is. But she won't get engagement unless she follows a process--daily posting, relentless reinvention, new forms of content generation, etc--that comes without effort or thought to an 18-year-old. That is probably why most Indian politicians who have ambitions on Instagram are swimming against the tide. They will rely on consultants but run headlong into another phenomenon that the platform rewards, authenticity. These are not waters that are easily navigated unless born to it.